FormationBot

FormationBot renders square dance formations as pictures, to aid discussions of calling. It is open source, under the MIT license.

This version of FormationBot is based off of Alex Dehnert's original

Formatting language

FormationBot supports a mini-language to indicate formations. A person is represented by a single character, with optional prefixes to modify rendering.

Facing directions are indicated with:

• <, >, ^, and v (or V) represent a person facing in the appropriate direction
• nsew can be used similarly (north, south, etc.) when more convenient (for example, mobile keyboards)
• ,, @, and * represent a person with no facing direction
• + draws a simple cross in place of a dancer
• . represents an empty position

Other common prefixes include:

• colors: r, g, b, c, m, and y for red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow, respectively
• shape: o or O (lowercase or capital letter 'o') will make the dancer a circle
• outline styles: - or : will give the dancer a dashed or dotted outline, respectively (for backwards compatibility, p is supported as a synonym for -)
• labels: x, X, a digit, or ' (apostrophe) followed by any character will fill the box in appropriately

For complicated formations, one trick is that each line is centered. If that's not enough, you can also prefix u, d, l, or R (yes, case-sensitive) to shift a person up or down a half matrix spot.

Improvements over the old version

• More colors (cyan and magenta)
• Circular dancers (in addition to square ones, of course)
• An additional style of phantom (dotted outline in addition to dashed)
• + for marking matrix spots without dancers
• Label dancers with arbitrary characters, not just X, O, or 0-9
• Dancers offset above the top row or below the bottom row (e.g. u@ d@) are not cropped out
• Dancers have the same horizontal and vertical spacing

Standalone usage

If you don't have it installed, install Rust.

Then, run cargo run. This program reads from stdin until end-of-file, and then renders the formation in SVG to the file out.svg.

Discord bot

Follow the instructions in discord-bot/README.md