Half tone stencilling with 30% less repeditive strain injury

The process I came up with is pretty straight forward

get an image
crop to 4:3 or any other neat golden mean which you can find a canvas for
reduce to a small number of pixels, I used 160x120px
drop to greyscale
8 colour palette using dithering
save as gif
run it through program below to make a black square for each pixel
convert SVG to PostScript
use Poster to blow it up to 4x4 A4 sheets to the size of your canvas
Print to overhead transperancys, you will get registration points and numbering of the tiles
cut out all the squares to make stencils
apply black enamel paint to white canvas
enjoy the analog digital fusion
160x120 pixels means you have to cut out 19200 little squares

Another idea would be to get 8 hole punches and change the code below to indicate what radius hole punch to use

that would cut down on the rsi by at least 80%


#!/usr/bin/env python
"""\
SVG.py - Construct/display SVG scenes.

The following code is a lightweight wrapper around SVG files. The metaphor
is to construct a scene, add objects to it, and then write it to a file
to display it.

This program uses ImageMagick to display the SVG files. ImageMagick also
does a remarkable job of converting SVG files into other formats.
"""
import math
import os

from PIL import Image

display_prog = 'display' # Command to execute to display images.

class Scene:
	def __init__(self,name="svg",height=400,width=400):
		self.name = name
		self.items = []
		self.height = height
		self.width = width
		return

	def add(self,item): self.items.append(item)

	def strarray(self):
		var = ["<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n",
			   "<svg height=\"%d\" width=\"%d\" >\n" % (self.height,self.width),
			   " <g style=\"fill-opacity:1.0; stroke:none;\n",
			   "  stroke-width:0;\">\n"]
		for item in self.items: var += item.strarray()
		var += [" </g>\n</svg>\n"]
		return var

	def write_svg(self,filename=None):
		if filename:
			self.svgname = filename
		else:
			self.svgname = self.name + ".svg"
		file = open(self.svgname,'w')
		file.writelines(self.strarray())
		file.close()
		return

	def display(self,prog=display_prog):
		os.system("%s %s" % (prog,self.svgname))
		return


class Line:
	def __init__(self,start,end):
		self.start = start #xy tuple
		self.end = end	 #xy tuple
		return

	def strarray(self):
		return ["  <line x1=\"%d\" y1=\"%d\" x2=\"%d\" y2=\"%d\" />\n" %\
				(self.start[0],self.start[1],self.end[0],self.end[1])]


class Circle:
	def __init__(self,center,radius,color):
		self.center = center #xy tuple
		self.radius = radius #xy tuple
		self.color = color   #rgb tuple in range(0,256)
		return

	def strarray(self):
		return ["  <circle cx=\"%d\" cy=\"%d\" r=\"%04f\"\n" %\
				(self.center[0],self.center[1],self.radius),
				"	style=\"fill:%s;\"  />\n" % colorstr(self.color)]

class Rectangle:
	def __init__(self,origin,height,width,color):
		self.origin = origin
		self.height = height
		self.width = width
		self.color = color
		return

	def strarray(self):
		return ["  <rect x=\"%04f\" y=\"%04f\" height=\"%04f\"\n" %\
				(float(self.origin[0]),float(self.origin[1]),float(self.height)),
				"	width=\"%d\" style=\"fill:%s;\" />\n" %\
				(self.width,colorstr(self.color))]

class Text:
	def __init__(self,origin,text,size=24):
		self.origin = origin
		self.text = text
		self.size = size
		return

	def strarray(self):
		return ["  <text x=\"%d\" y=\"%d\" font-size=\"%d\">\n" %\
				(self.origin[0],self.origin[1],self.size),
				"   %s\n" % self.text,
				"  </text>\n"]


def colorstr(rgb): return "#%x%x%x" % (rgb[0]/16,rgb[1]/16,rgb[2]/16)

def test():
	curImage = Image.open("/home/samh/input.gif")
	dimensions = curImage.size

	#print dimensions
	scale = 20.0
	scene = Scene('test',dimensions[1]*scale,dimensions[0]*scale)
	paletteSize = 8.0#len(curImage.palette.palette)/len(curImage.palette.getdata()[0])
	for row in range(dimensions[0]):
		for column in range(dimensions[1]):
			size = math.pow( (1 - float(curImage.getpixel((row,column)))/float(paletteSize))*2,0.5) * scale
			dimension = scale/float(paletteSize) * size
			black  = (0,0,0)
			bottomRight = (row*scale,column*scale)
			scene.add(Rectangle(bottomRight,dimension/5.0,dimension/5.0,black))
	scene.write_svg(filename="test.svg")
	scene.display(prog="inkscape")
	return

if __name__ == '__main__': test()