I love cheat sheets. A good cheat sheet decorates your desk and presents its content in a simple and understandable way. And a perfect cheat sheet presents its content also in an entertaining way and is called Cheat Cube. Cheat Cubes are awesome. It decorates your desk and serves as a toy, while waiting for a download to end, a game to load or a compiler to finish its process. And as a pleasant side effect, you learn some new stuff, you can benefit from in your daily life.
However, I was looking for a weekend project and decided to write my first Inkscape Plugin that simplifies the creation of Cheat Cubes and I ended up with Cubify.
In order to install this plugin you should first download the sources from GitHub:
$ git clone https://github.com/Bornageek/CubifyThen you can move the downloaded files to the extentions folder of your Inkscape installation:
$ sudo cp ./Cubify/* /usr/share/inkscape/extentions/
If you now start Inkscape, you should see a new entry in the Extentions -> Python submenu, named Cubify. Open a new document and start the Cubify extention wizzard located under Extentions -> Python -> Cubify …. Here you can change different options modifying the look and feel as well as the content of your cheat cube.
The first entries of this dialog can be used to change the color scheme of your cheat cube. So you can change the main text color, the text and background color of the footer (eg. title) of a cube side and the text and background color of the hint box above this footer. Furthermore you can set the cheat cube logo and the background color of the logo side.
Below this color scheme preferences, you will find a tabbed pane with five tabs, which each holds the preferences of one side of the cube. Here you can set the title of the footer, the hint text above and the title image as well as fifteen text lines for the cube side. Within this text lines you can use a very small subset of bbcode to format this lines. You can use [b][/b] for bold and [i][/i] for italic text, as well as [color=000000][/color] to change the text color. The color is specified using the color’s hex code, but without a leading hashtag (#).
When you entered all important data, click Apply and close the wizzard. You will see the scheme of your custom Cheat Cube. If the skeleton does not fit the document layout, visit Files -> Document Properties … and choose Resize page to content … at the bottom of the dialog. Select Resize page to drawing or selection and close the dialog. Now the skeleton of your Cheat Cube should exactly fit the document.
Caution: Currently you can only use *.svg images for the logos.
Hope, you like this plugin and start creating your own Cheat Cubes. Looking forward to see some of your creations. Just share them with me in this post or share it with me on twitter.
Until next time, stay geeky.