About

This tool is intended for use in online forum-based music sharing games with formats based on the Eurovision Song Contest. The tool generates banners using ASCII art, based on ASCII flags placed in the Flags-ASCII folder and entry data entered in the spreadsheet entries.xlsx.

Requirements

This tool uses the third party module OpenPyXL. Please install this module before attempting to run the Python scripts included here.

Instructions

1. Enter the nation names, artist names, song titles, and (optionally) URLs in the corresponding columns in the spreadsheet entries.xlsx.
2. Convert the nations' flags to ASCII art using https://www.ascii-art-generator.org/, using a width of 60 characters. Download the resulting .txt files and save them to the Flags-ASCII folder. Name the .txt files according to the nation names listed in entries.xlsx. You may alternatively create your own ASCII art for each nation.
3. Run banner_generator.py. This will generate ASCII banners using the data in entries.xlsx together with the ASCII flags in the Flags-ASCII folder, saving them to the Banners folder.
4. (Optional) Run show_generator.py. This will create the file show.txt, which contains all the banners with URLs added (ordered according to entries.xlsx), written in BBCode so that it can be pasted into a forum post. Please note, this may need to be split into several posts, due to the forum's character limit.