CS 226: Data Structures, Program #6

Turtle Text

Assigned: Monday, November 22
Font characters due: Wednesday, December 1 (so we can build and distribute the complete font to all students)
Due: Monday, December 6, Tuesday, December 7, 11:59 pm (GRADED)  (extended by one day)

(Reminder: Please do not look at each other's source code except for any designated project partner. We will be actively looking for programs that are "too similar", and I do not wish to find any.)

Overview

In this program, you will build on the previous ungraded assignment to develop a font. Each character of the font is a macro call, with certain expectations as to where the character should be drawn from the current turtle position as well as expectations as to where the turtle should end up after drawing the character. Using this font facility, it will be possible to print strings of characters at any orientation. In addition, we will allow commands to be loaded from a file to facilitate loading of macros such as font characters, etc.

New Turtle Commands

We will add a few more commands to our command set as follows:
load "filename"
save "filename"
font <fontname>
print "string"
scale <scalefactor>

load

The load command takes a filename as an argument. The filename should actually be surrounded by quotes. This will allow you to use file names including spaces. When preparing to read the filename, you may have to set your parser to accept the double quote character as a delimeter and not to use spaces as a delimeter. The commands read from the file should be exectued as if you had just typed them in. Thus, the load command itself will not appear in the undo queue, and calling an undo after a load will just undo the last valid command from the loaded file. As a consequence, you will not be reloading the file with every future undo command (as you might if you just enqueued the load command itself). Note that this is different from the expected behavior of the call command from program 5. For the call command, the call itself should be stored on the queue, so you can undo an entire macro call with a single undo. Because of this, you should not currently allow an undo/redo command to appear in a macro definition, because its behavior would be undefined (but undo/redo should be allowed in a file, though perhaps not terribly useful).

save

The save command will write out the entire command sequence from the undo queue into a text file. Besides being a generally useful operation, this should be helpful when you want to save out your font macros to a file. It should then be possible to perform a load on this file during a future program execution to reload all your macros, etc. (Of course, you may often want to edit this file to remove unnecessary commands, etc.)

font

The font command is followed by a font name. As with macro names, the font name should begin with a letter, followed by a sequence of letters, numbers, and underscores. This font name will be used to convert the print command (see description below) into a sequence of macro calls. Thus, the current font name should be stored as part of your turtle's state (so it can be pushed, popped, etc.). The default value for the font is just a null string.

print

The macro names for your individual characters will take the form:
<fontname>-<charactercode>

That is, the font name (without the angle brackets), followed by a hyphen, followed by an integer representing the Unicode character code (which is a just superset of ASCII -- your keyboard will typically only allow you to type in ASCII characters in any case). Given the string (which is delimited by double quotes, as in the load and save commands), the print command should call a sequence of macro calls to print the individual characters, one after the other. The print command itself should be placed on the undo queue, so a print command followed by an undo should undo all of the printed characters.

scale

The scale command should set the current scale factor of the turtle state. The scale factor is a positive floating point value, with a default setting of 1.0. The scale factor should be used to multiply the distance the turtle moves in each move command. Thus, setting the scale factor to 2.0 will make the turtle draw things twice as big in subsequent move commands. Notice that this will allow you to draw your fonts and other macros at different scales as well.

Using Files

Similar to reading from System.in, you can set up a BufferedReader for a file as follows:
java.io.FileInputStream file = new java.io.FileInputStream(filename);
java.io.BufferedReader in = new java.io.BufferedReader(new java.io.InputStreamReader(file));
StreamTokenizer tok = new StreamTokenizer(in);
And similar to printing to System.out and System.err, you can set up a PrintWriter for a file as follows:
java.io.FileOutputStream file = new java.io.FileOutputStream(filename);
java.io.PrintWriter out = new java.io.PrintWriter(file);
This print writer supports the print( ) and println( ) methods you are familiar with from System.out and System.err.

Font Character Formatting

The turtle print command you develop should place characters end-to-end in a "left-to-right" fashion. However, the actual orientation of what is "left-to-right" depends on the current orientation of the turtle. When you develop your font characters, assume that the turtle is pointing to the right and is located at the baseline of the font. In other words, whatever position and orientation the turtle is currently in when you issue a macro call to draw a character, the current orientation may be thought of as "right" and the current position will be used as the baseline. When you are done drawing a character, you should leave the turtle position at the same baseline and pointing in the same direction ("right") as it was when the macro was called, but leaving some number of spaces between characters. Thus the turtle ends up in the correct position to begin drawing another character.

The name of the font we will design together as a class is CS226 (so the macro name for "A" should be CS226-65). For this font, please design all your characters to be 12 pixels high and 10 pixels wide. Lower-case characters that dip below the baseline (for example, "p", "g", "y", etc.) should go down to 3 pixels below the baseline. You should leave an additional two pixel space between the characters. This is a monospaced font (as opposed to a variable width font). Each person will be assigned characters to design and we will collect them all into a font. If you want to model your font after an existing font, try Courier. Please feel free to trade characters with your classmates in advance of the deadline so you can better test and use your program. (This trading will not involve exchanging any code - just font macro definition files).

Program Execution

Your TurtleCommander program should execute in the same way as the TurtleCommander in Program #3. You should be able to type into it interactively or redirect standard input from a file or another program as described in that assignment. Of course, now you can also load files during an interactive session using the new load command.

As in previous assignments, you should handle error conditions gracefully, without causing the program to crash or exit unless absolutely necessary.

Restrictions

You may use the java.io and java.lang class libraries. You may use the StreamTokeninzer or the StringTokenizer to parse your input, as in previous assignments.  In general, you may not use classes from the java.util library unless you receive permission to do so for some particular class. One exception is the java.util.Random class, which may be useful for testing some of your programs and does not jeopardize the goals of the class.

Submission - Read  this Carefully

This is a graded program. Your submission should include a set of .java files, a single macro file called font.txt containing all your assigned font characters (for both members of a team) and a README.txt file with any information you want to tell the grader about running your program. You should also turn in a couple of command files you used to test your program. Your main program class must be called TurtleCommander, and thus it should be compilable using "javac *.java" and runnable with the command "java TurtleCommander". You should submit your program  as a single .zip (zip archive) file. This file should have no directory structure in it -- just the actual files, so extracting them should result in all your original files placed in the current directory. 

To submit, you should follow these steps:

  1. Create the .zip file for submission
  2. Make a new, empty directory
  3. Copy the submission file to the new directory
  4. Extract all the files from your submission file into the new directory
  5. Verify that you can compile and run the program on your test cases in the new directory.
  6. Go to the submissions page
  7. Submit the .zip file, making sure that the file appears in the directory listing displayed in the browser after submission (the file size listed could be slightly different on the recipient SunOS machine from that of a Windows  OS machine, but they should be very similar)
  8. Also in the submissions page, View the submission to be certain that the file is there (you should see basically the same directory listing you saw at the end of step 7).
If anything goes wrong with steps 7 or 8, try repeating them (resubmitting your file overwrites any previous submission and time stamp). If you cannot successfully submit your assignment, immediately send e-mail to the professor andthe head TA explaining the problem (with all details so we can hopefully fix it) and including the submission file as an e-mail (MIME) attachment. It is your responsibility to verify that the assignment is received. If we do not have an assignment or record of its submission, it will receive zero points.

Grading

This program is ungraded, but the following one will be graded based on:
Compiling and running
Proper execution on a number of our test cases (with valid and invalid inputs)
Overall implementation correctness
Comments, style, and readability (informative,  but not extraneous comments are appreciated)
Font character readability and correctness
If your program does not compile, you can expect to receive very few points, if any. This should encourage you to take care in your submission process.

Parting Words

Have fun with fonts! The sooner you design your font characters, the sooner you can trade with your friends and collect the whole set! 
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November 22, 2004