Wad2PDF

Hi

I have written a tool called Wad2PDF that converts Doom levels to PDF files. It draws a bird's eye view of every level, with the floors properly texturized and items drawn with their graphics. Further info and screenshot goodness can be found here.

Awsome!

Wow, useless and cool!
:-)

m0l0t0v said:
useless and cool!

That's my goal in life.

Nice!

Comparing your Python WAD code with my own is quite interesting. And my code for unpacking images is about 10x faster than yours :)

Hey this is cool.

Should please those who like to post top down shots of their levels.

heh, I love seeing these kind of oddball utilities for such an old game. Not sure just how useful it'll be to anyone but I'll keep a copy in case I find one.

Hopefully this isn't a stupid question, not having tried the program yet, but by your description I'd have to ask, why to a PDF instead of an image file?

Draconio said:

Hopefully this isn't a stupid question, not having tried the program yet, but by your description I'd have to ask, why to a PDF instead of an image file?

There are several reasons. The "real" reason is that I wanted to learn how PDF files work. Anyway, here are some other reasons:

- PDF is ubiquitous
- PDF can draw polygons filled with textures easily
- PDF is resolution independent (Want to print E1M1 on a 10 meters by 10 meters billboard? No prob.)
- One PDF file can hold several levels
- Converting PDF to image files is quite simple (and way more efficient than the other way around)

I know nothing about python, and having looked around, it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing I really want to know about or would enjoy finding out about either. However, this util looks quite cool. Is there any way of porting it to some kind of stand alone executable that doesn't need python?

Enjay said:

Is there any way of porting it to some kind of stand alone executable that doesn't need python?

I seem to recall that there is a program that converts Python scripts to exes. However using the current proggie takes two steps:

1. Install Python
2. Run script

With a stand alone exe you'd basically have to do step 2 in an almost identical way. The exe conversion would not save much work, really.

The advantage of downloading a py2exe'd program instead of a source file and the full Python distribution is that the latter weighs about 10 MB.

The advantage of the Python script is that it works with Windows, Linux, Unix… Ooooh, I’d like to convert it into a Linux executable and send it to Windows users. ;-]