weekly_challenges.py

Generates challenge-related images for the Glyphs and Alphabets discord server. Assumes a Linux environment, and invokes pdftoppm, convert (part of imagemagick), xelatex and fc-match (for local font information).

All images should be stored in a folder named Images. For quick testing, copy sample_images to Images. The usage examples below use the sample images. The format of this directory is as follows:

• Glyph submissions should have the filenames Glyph_1, Glyph_2, etc (with any image file extension).
• Ambigram submissions are likewise Ambi_1, Ambi_2, etc.
• User profile pictures should have filenames matching the user's names and should be stored in a subdirectory Images/pfp. Note that LaTeX doesn't like the characters &%$#{}~^\ in filenames, so for now these should simply be stripped from stored usernames.
• The winning submissions should be copied to files named GlyphWinnerFirst, GlyphWinnerSecond, GlyphWinnerThird for the glyph challenge, and likewise AmbiWinnerFirst, AmbiWinnerSecond, AmbiWinnerThird for the ambigram challenge (with the appropriate file extensions).

For the full list of available options, consult weekly_challenges.py -h which will give a list of subcommands and a brief description of their usage, and weekly_challenges.py <SUBCOMMAND> -h for detailed description of one particular subcommand.

The LaTeX code in this repo is coauthored by one doggo.

Table of Contents

• Example Usage
• Font Selection

Example Usage

The following examples cover all of the glyph challenge-related commands, and the equivalent ambigram challenge commands work identically (with ambigram in place of glyph).

>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_announcement 🐱

Date and background colour (which is on a weekly cycle) are automatically determined. For this example character, the font Noto Emoji is automatically selected and will be used so long as it is present on the system (if you get an error with this particular character, it's likely that Noto Color Emoji, which is more widely installed but will not work here, is being chosen instead). The font and font size can be overriden with the --font and --size flags, in this subcommand and several others.

>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_poll 🐱

Glyph submissions are pulled from the Images directory as explained above. The number of columns, in this and other grid-related subcommands, is determined automatically but can be overriden by --cols.

>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_first dogg 
>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_second the_uwuji 
>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_third nope

Winning submissions are pulled from the appropriately named files in Images as explained above, and user profile pictures are likewise pulled from the images in Images/pfp with the same filenames as the usernames you pass in.

>>> weekly_challenges.py glyph_suggestions a 木 🐱 ꁱ 爨 ꖵ さ ক্ষ

Suggestions are separated by spaces, and each one has a font auto-selected. Overriding these fonts and their sizes is not yet supported.

Font Selection

Automatic font selection proceeds according to the file font_data.json, which contains a list of fonts. Each font must be present on the system (as a .ttf or .otf in the relevant system directories, not just within the LaTeX installation), so that the fontconfig tool fc-match can be used to automatically determine which glyphs it supports (the exception is STIX Two Text, the main font of the document, whose glyph support has been hardcoded for convenience as it is rarely present outside of LaTeX).

The order of fonts within the file is significant because each string will be displayed in the first font in the list which supports all of its Unicode characters.

There are also a few additional flags which can be attached to a font:

• "load_as" is used for internal LaTeX font loading and can be mostly ignored.
• "excludes" can be used to dictate that even if a font supports a glyph in a given Unicode range, it will not be used for it, meaning that font selection will proceed further down the list. For example, BabelStone Han is set as the preferred font for Han characters, but is not the preferred font for several other Unicode blocks for which it has partial or full support, including Japanese kana. Excluding these ranges allows us to keep BabelStone Han above all other Han fonts without also prioritising its other glyphs.
• "size_percentage" can be used if a font has consistently oversized or undersized glyphs that would otherwise necessitate frequent manual overrides. It is a simple multiplier, expressed as a percentage, that will be applied whenever the font is automatically selected by the font selection algorithm. Note that if the same font is selected manually, the multiplier will not be applied.