Bingo!

Matts on 2002-05-19T16:26:15

PDFLib rocks. I hate to kinda self-gloat, but it's just a really nice module, very easy to use, and great for knocking together quick PDF's.

My wife is an english teacher. She has invented a game for a lesson this week called "Dictionary Bingo", where she reads out the meaning for a word, and you have to check it off on your bingo card. So I wrote a utility to generate the cards for her:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use PDFLib;

my @words = ;
chomp @words;

warn("got @words\n");

my $cards = shift @ARGV || die "Must supply number of cards\n";

print "Making $cards bingo cards\n";

my $pdf = PDFLib->new(
    filename => "bingo.pdf",
    papersize => "a4",
    creator => "Matt Sergeant",
    author => "Heather Sergeant",
    title => "Bingo!",
);

foreach my $i (1..$cards) {
    my %seen;

    print "Card $i\n";
    
    $pdf->start_page;
    
    $pdf->set_font(face => "Helvetica", size => 30, bold => 1);

    $pdf->print_boxed("Bingo!", mode => "center", x => 0, y => 740, w => 595, h => 50);
    
    $pdf->rect(x => 100, y => 200, w => 400, h => 400);
    $pdf->stroke;

    $pdf->set_font(face => "Helvetica", size => 20, bold => 0);

    for my $x (1..4) {
        for my $y (1..4) {
            my $word;
            while (1) {
                my $index = rand(@words);
                $word = $words[$index];
                if (!$seen{$word}) {
                    $seen{$word}++;
                    last;
                }
            }
            $pdf->print_boxed($word, mode => "center", x => (100 + (($x - 1) * 100)), y => (160 + (($y - 1) * 100)), w => 100, h => 100);
            if ($y != 1) {
                $pdf->move_to( 100, (200 + (($y - 1) * 100)) );
                $pdf->line_to( 500, (200 + (($y - 1) * 100)) );
                $pdf->stroke;
            }
        }
        if ($x != 1) {
            $pdf->move_to( (100 + (($x - 1) * 100)), 200 );
            $pdf->line_to( (100 + (($x - 1) * 100)), 600 );
            $pdf->stroke;
        }
    }
}

$pdf->finish;

1;

I'm skipping the __DATA__ section because I don't have it yet, but it basically contains all the words.