Ticklish Business

Tcl and Tk are pretty fun tools to have in your programming toolbox, especially since it works on both the Unix and Microsoft worlds.

My hands hurt too much to say more at the moment. Which is a grand segue to the only Tk software that I have available: writsctl. This is a front end that allows you to tweak your XWrits settings a little more gracefully. Trust me, this is a good thing (TM). XWrits has a lot of options.

I've also got a number of small PostScript generating utility programs which I find very handy to have. In particular they relieve me of the difficulty of finding sources for various specialty papers (e.g. quadrille papers at various scales). They are moderately unfriendly to use, since they don't have any kind of built-in help messages, but the code is quite short and pretty much self-documenting.

graph-paper

Generates quadrille paper, with an atempt at sane margins. Someday RSN, I'm going to implement weighted subdivisions of the generated graph paper, but for the moment is pretty much boring quadrille.

hex

Generates hex paper (as used in strategy games and maps) at various sizes. The size is intended to be the distance across the widest part of the hexagons. This program actually uses GhostScript to generate printer language output (specifically HP LaserJet 4 PCL) instead of pure PostScript. This is a bug, and I will fix it soon. In the meantime, you can edit the source to suit your system.

composition-paper

Produces the classic grade-school writing paper. You know, the stuff with the dotted line down the middle so that you could better gauge the height of lower-case letters. We make use of this because we're home-schooling our kids.

Copyright © 2001 by David Rush