readme.txt

spirograph.py is a direct port of the Java applet by Anu Garg at:

  http://www.wordsmith.org/anu/java/spirograph.html

The following quote is from Anu's page:

What is a Spirograph?
A Spirograph is formed by rolling a circle inside or outside of another circle. The
pen is placed at any point on the rolling circle. If the radius of fixed circle is R,
the radius of moving circle is r, and the offset of the pen point in the moving circle
is O, then the equation of the resulting curve is defined by: 


	x = (R+r)*cos(t) - O*cos(((R+r)/r)*t)

	y = (R+r)*sin(t) - O*sin(((R+r)/r)*t)


There is a second sample called spirographInteractive.py which draws the complete
spirograph as each slider, color, or other value is changed. This makes
spirographInteractive much more like the Java applet and the drawing speed is similar.
On a machine with a faster video card, drawing should be sufficiently fast that the UI
won't be sluggish unless the number of revolutions is quite high. However, since
spirographInteractive doesn't allow you to see the individual points or lines of the
pattern as they are drawn or overlay multiple patterns and is more demanding of
machine resources I decided to make it a separate program rather than complicating the
code and UI of the spirograph sample.