generate_pieces.py

"""Scid vs. PC piece set generator

This is a simple script I wrote to generate custom chess piece sets to be used
with Scid vs. PC. It was tested on Linux (Fedora Xfce 37), but it should also
work on Windows provided ImageMagick is installed and present in the user's
PATH environment variable.

There is a template and some instructions in the Scid vs. PC support files, but
they are not very clear and the only thing the scripts provided do is encode
image files to base64, leaving the work of resizing them to multiple sizes and
assembling the piece set file to be done by hand, without explaining how this
should be accomplished.

This script takes exactly three positional arguments: the name of the piece
set, the path to the input file (the script expects a 160px tall PNG image),
and the path to the output file (I recommend using .txt as the file extension).
"""

import base64
import subprocess
import textwrap
import sys

name = sys.argv[1]
infile = sys.argv[2]
outfile = sys.argv[3]

min_size = 25
max_size = 160

sizes = range(min_size, max_size+1, 5)

with open(outfile, "w") as f:
    f.write(f"lappend boardStyles {name}\n")

for size in sizes:
    process = subprocess.run(
        f"magick {infile} -resize x{size} PNG:-", shell=True, capture_output=True
    )
    data = base64.b64encode(process.stdout)
    data = textwrap.fill(data.decode(), width=80)
    with open(outfile, "a") as f:
        f.write(f"set pieceImageData({name},{size}) {{\n{data}\n}}\n")