README.kivy

Introduction
------------

This is a version of the PySol FC open source project
(http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net)

Early investigations of the code showed, that it would not be
a too big effort to add a new user interface (UI).

The new UI using kivy has been designed to meet requirements
of tablet and smartphone devices. Most of the functionality
of the original version has been maintained

The new UI is selected via a new command line option '--kivy'.
The original user interfaces will continue to work. To run the
kivy version call:

$ python pysol.py --kivy


Images
------

The original images supplied by the collection are of type
gif. In kivy, that image type loads very slowly. Moreover, many
cards cannot be loaded, because of decoding errors.
To prevent these problems, the kivy version was
modified to not read any gif images.

Some cardsets have been translated to PNG, a format
that is processed by both the tk and the kivy versions.

Some others, for which transparency information is not
processed correctly even from the PBF images, have been translated
to the BMP image format (while keeping their GIF variant for
the tk version). BMP format is only processed by the
kivy version.

Additional cardsets are available from the SourceForge
project. To use them with kivy, they need to be converted to
the BMP format. A shell script, 'cardconv' , has been added
to the scripts directory (it requires Bash and ImageMagick).

For all GIF images in the directories data/images and data/tiles ,
corresponding images in the PNG format have been added too.

LB170321.