Still tweaking the first two entries in the Alleged Tarot 2002: I am still having trouble with my crude tools, which consist of an obsolete version of Adobe® Illustrator (on Mac OS 9), a free Python-based sketch program called Sketch (which can output in a near-SVG format, but which has trouble converting Illustrator’s CMYK colours), and a script for fixing up the namespaces in SVG files...
I have added the four Aces to the Tarot project. I have also hand-corrected the colours in the SVG files (to adjust for the oversimplified CMYK-to-RGB conversion). Because I have not yet defined some letters in the title font, there are some blanks in the titles on the cards...
I have redesigned the layout of the cards so that the titles are on the left side rather than the right—and this way they read up from the bottom of the card rather than from some point part-way down. This means I can fit in the Wheel of Fortune without the rest of them looking lop-sided. Also, I have decided that the titles will no longer overlap the artwork.
I have also fixed a few bugs—the Ace of Coins had not had its colours adjusted after the CMYK→RGB translation; Five of Coins had changed the figure’s hair from pink to white; The Chariot was cropped wrongly.
To explain the colour issue: I am using an old version of Adobe Illustrator which does not seem to have an RGB option. To convert to SVG I use a freeware drawing program called Sketch, which is happy to translate CMYK to RGB, but does not take account of the fact that Adobe’s screen display simulates the printed paper, rather than showing mathematically correct CMYK colours. My brute-force solution to this is to cobble together a Python script that takes as inputs Adobe Illustrator’s Targa image and a screen shot of the ‘bad’ SVG, and examines them pixel-by-pixel to generate a map from the ‘bad’ colour space to the correct one. It then generates a new SVG file with the adjusted colours. Sounds complicated? I’m hoping the new version of Sketch will make it unnecessary...
This week’s installment of my on-line tarot deck is two more of the trumps: XVIII. The Moon and XVIIII. The Sun. The Moon proved a little tricky, not just because of the number of weird symbols that need to be included, but also because I used a lot of CMYK colours with nonzero black (K) components. It seems that this (or some other property of the colours I picked) caused Sketch’s screen colours to differ from the numbers written in to the SVG file, which broke my automatic palette-adjustment program. I had to edit several colour entries by hand...
¶ Perhaps you are wondering why I have numbered the Sun XVIIII
rather than the more conventional XIX. There is method to this
madness. For one thing, the form VIIII did once upon a time
exist, until the more concise form IX gained popularity. Using
the longer forms has the interesting side-effect that the Roman
numerals up to XXXXVIIII can be sorted alphabetically (I comes
before V, V before VI, VIIII before X, and so on). The theory
was that this would make the file names for the trumps neatly
sort in to the correct order in directory listings (because
I use names like iii-empress and xviiii-sun). That works
if hyphens are considered to precede letters in the alphabetical
sequence (as they do in ASCII). It turns out that
Microsoft Windows NT has other ideas—it sorts punctuation
characters after letters, which totally undoes my
clever trick.