[Tutor] Drawing a figure

[Alan Gauld]

On 30/12/11 14:12, Stayvoid wrote:
> I want to write a program that can draw a figure using the coordinates
> specified by the user and calculate its area. An output should be
> saved in tiff or png.
> What should I use for this?

You have lots of options.

Since you are on a Mac you might want to try using the Mac native 
libraries or OpenGL. Both are available via the MacPython downloads.

Or more generically you can use one of the several cross-platform GUI 
toolkits (GTk, Qt, wxPython, Tkinter) - they all have a Canvas widget 
that allows you to draw figures.

But the easiest option is probably to use the turtle module which
lets you draw graphics using turtle commands (like forward, rioght, 
left, pen up,down, etc. The documentation has several examples and you 
can find lots of web pages discussing turtle graphics in general terms.

Calculating the area is probablybest done indepenmdantly of drawing the 
figure., Store the coordinates, calculate the shape and hyence its area 
and display the result. You can buuld this as a  text based app first or 
get the turtle stuff working first, it really doesn;t matter which, then 
stitch the two elements together in a single UI.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/