Python 2.6 Graphics Cookbook: Learn how to use Python’s built-in graphics capabilities to create static and animated graphics for a range of real-world purposes. Over 100 recipes take you from basic shape creation to developing interactive GUIs.

Any instructions you type into a Linux X terminal or DOS terminal in MS Windows are treated as operating system commands. By starting these commands from within the same directory where your Python program is stored you do not have to tell the Python and operating system where to search for your code. You could store the code in another directory but you would then need to precede the program name with the path.

Try the longer version of the same basic print instructions shown in the following program.

All the text between the """ (triple quotation marks) is purely for the sake of good documentation and record keeping. It is for the use of programmers, and that includes you. Alas, the human memory is imperfect. Bitter experience will persuade you that it is wise to provide fairly complete information as a header in your programs as well as comments inside the program.

However, in the interest of saving space and avoiding distractions, these header comments have been left out in the rest of this book.

The print command is an instruction to write or print any text between quotation marks like "show these words" onto the monitor screen attached to your computer. It will also print the values of any named variables or expressions typed after print.

For example: print "dog's name:", dog_name. Where dog_name is the name of a variable used to store some data.

The print command is very useful when you are debugging a complicated sequence of code because even if the execution fails to complete because of errors, any print commands encountered before the error is reached will be respected. So by thoughtful placing of various print statements in your code, you are able to zero in on what is causing your program to crash.

When you are writing a piece of Python code for the first time, you are often a bit unsure if your understanding of the logic is completely correct. So we would like to watch the progress of instruction execution in an exploratory way. It is a great help to be able to see that at least part of the code works. A major strength of Python is the way it takes our instructions one at a time and executes them progressively. It will only stop when the end is reached or a when programming flaw halts progress. If we have a twenty line program and only the first five lines are bug-free and the rest are unexecutable garbage, the Python interpreter will at least execute the first five. This is where the print command is a really potent little tool.

This is how you use print and the Python interpreter. When we are having trouble with our code and it just won't work and we are battling to figure out why, we can just insert print statements at various chosen points in our program. This way you can get some intermediate values of variables as your own private status reports. When we want to switch off our print watchdogs we simply type a hash (#) symbol in front, thus transforming them into passive comments. Later on, if you change your mind and want the prints to be active again you just remove the leading hash symbols.

To draw a line, we only need to give the start point and the end point.

The start point is the first pair of numbers in canvas_1.create_line(10,20 , 50,70).In another way, the start is given by the coordinates x_start=10 and y_start=20. The end point of the line is specified by the second pair of numbers x_end=50 and y_end=70. The units of measurement are pixels. A pixel is the smallest dot that can be displayed on our screen.

For all other properties like line thickness or color, default values of the create_line() method are used.

However, should you want to change color or thickness, you just do it by specifying the settings.

You will need to download cx_Freeze from http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/. We need to pick a version that has the same version number as the Python version we are using. Currently, there are versions available from version 2.4 up to 3.1.

A word of caution. If we use external files like images inside our code, then the path addresses of the files must be absolute because they are coded into, or frozen, into the executable version of our Python program. There are ways of setting up search paths which can be read at http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/cx_Freeze.html.

For example, say we want to use some GIF images in our program and then demonstrate them on other computers. First we place a folder called, for example, /birdy_pics, onto a USB memory stick. In the original program, walking_birdy_1.py, make sure the path addresses to the images point to the /birdy_pics folder on the stick. After compilation, copy the folder build onto the USB memory stick. Now when we double-click on the executable walking_birdy_1 it can locate the images on the USB memory stick when it needs to. These files include everything that is needed for your program, and you should distribute the whole directory contents to any user who wants to run your program without needing to install Python or Tkinter.

There is another program called py2exe that will also create executables to run on MS Windows. However, it cannot create self-contained binary executables to run under Linux whereas cx_Freeze can.