The aim of pyprototypr is to provide a general purpose program that allows you to design simple and reproducible graphics that can be used for prototyping the elements or components of a project such as the creation of a board game; including the board, the tiles, the cards and so on.
pyprototypr is NOT a full-blown graphics editor - like the Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, or Inkscape packages - or a desktop publishing tool - like Scribus, InDesign, or Xpress - which allow sophisticated creation of complex graphics and text layouts - and it does not attempt in any way to replicate their functionality!
pyprototypr is useful for anyone that needs to work on a design in an incremental fashion, tweaking and changing as they go along. Doing this with a regular graphics package can sometimes be tedious; especially when common changes need to be made across many elements.
Simple designs that make use of regular-shaped symbols or fonts are straightforward to implement in pyprototypr; but more complex pictures or background images should be made, as usual, in a regular graphics design package and then added into your script by a link to the image file.
pyprototypr also supports access of data in text files (“CSV”) and Excel documents; this can help separate out the design and layout from the content - the text and numbers - that appears in the design.
In general, what you do is type a set of instructions into a file on your computer, save that file, and then use Python to create your output - a PDF or PNG file - containing the results of those instructions; hopefully the design you intended!
As your design changes and evolves, you add or change instructions and recreate the output.
pyprototypr is written in Python; the reason being that this is a relatively easy-to-use programming language that is often used for scripting or automating routines - both by itself and as part of larger systems. Python has access to numerous libraries that help avoid having to write code from scratch.
NOTE Python is not a speedy language, but its still fast enough to use for pyprototypr
pyprototypr is designed such that you don’t need to know how to program in Python in order to use it; but if you are a Python programmer then you can certainly treat this as you would any other library and add in your own additional Python code or logic to your scripts for your own purpose.
Its suggested that you first get everything set-up and tested. Then read through the basic concepts before trying out a worked example. After that, browse through the sections listed in the index.