Programming Assignment 08a

Creating

with

(Creating Words with Photos)

Due: Friday, May 5th,  10:00 A.M.

An introduction

The other day I was surfing the web and I came across this picture:

And I thought "Wouldn't it be cool if students could write a method that would take in a simple string and produce the "picture version" of that string using the letters represented above.

So that is what you will do!

To begin

• create a directory named PA08 in the root of your directory space on the p: drive
• create a file named pa08.py in this directory
• download and unzip  letters.zip  in this directory

Inside this unzipped directory are Twenty Seven (27) picture files.  Twenty Six of these represent letters of the alphabet (for example, "A.jpg").  The Twenty Seventh is called "space.jpg"  and is simply a blank space.  Each of these images is exactly 100x100 pixels.

Creating a Picture with a Message

Write a method called

pictureMessage(text)

As indicated, this method takes only one parameters - a string containing a simple text message.

This method should return one new picture object which is the "concatenation" of the individual letter photos represented in the text message.  Thus,

output = pictureMessage("Ben Schafer")
show(output)

would return and display a single picture image that looked like

Things to think about:

• case of the input text - you should handle both upper and lower case inputs
• Non-alpha characters  -  You may reject any input parameters containing something OTHER than the 26 letters of the alphabet or a space.
• what to do when you call makeEmptyPicture(width,height)  -  The height of the output picture is easy.  All of the photos in the letter directory are 100x100 pixels. 

Optional Bonus

Rather than starting with the giant directory of 27 files, figure out how to use the original source file.  That is, figure out how to translate that the letter "B" is in the first row/second column while the letter "N" is in the third row/fourth column and a space is in the sixth row/second column.  Instead of opening up individual photos your method will just open up the main photo (eatphabet.jpg) and crop out the letters it needs to make it's result.