LEARN.md

What is tkArt?

tkArt is an accumulation of python programs made using tkinter, a standard GUI library for Python.

Each program is written to create a type of art/image using general programming knowledge and coordinate geometry.

Python

You can download and set up your python using the instructions given here.

To know the basics and understand the data structure usage in Python, a good start will be to view the freeCodeCamp tutotial on Python Basics.

Tkinter

tkinter is a standard GUI package that comes preinstalled with the default python library.

You can go through the documentation here.

Below, we shall also go through the basic workings of it.

Initialisation

Every program that uses tkinter shall begin with an import statement.

import tkinter as tk

Generally each tkinter program begins with definition of the root. This shall be responsible for creating a root window.

root = tk.Tk()

To set up UI instances and get events like clicks, etc, tkinter provides a method that shall set everything in a while loop until the window gets closed. This is referred to as mainloop and is generally implemented in a tkinter program.

root.mainloop()

A root shall contain a Canvas, this will act as a drawing board on which lines, circles, etc will be drawn. We also call a method called pack() which shall manage widget organisation in blocks before placing them in the parent widget.

width = 500
height = 500
win = tk.Canvas(root,width=width,height=height)
win.pack()

If one has dual monitor setup or requires the window to be created at a specific location in their screen, after declaring the root they can use geometry to adjust it.

# WidthxHeight-Xpadding-Ypadding
root.geometry("300x300-1000-1000")

To automatically scale the window to the size of the screen, one can change the state to zoomed.

root.state('zoomed')

Random

We shall be using randomness to generate points for any image we create. Hence for it, we shall import a built-in package called random. Through this, we can generate numbers or even make a selection from a given list.

import random

To generate a random integer, we can use randint where you specify a range of numbers.

random.randint(10, 50)

To change color of the canvas, we add a parameter called background to Canvas.

win = tk.Canvas(root, width=width, height=height, background="black")