Dataset of Consolas Regular Font - dataset

TLDR
Is there a dataset with every letter in consolas regular size 11 font as an image corresponding to its appearance in a console? If not, is there a quick way to generate this dataset?
Context
I am trying to create a neural network that generates asci art. My network will input an image and output a list of symbols. In order for the cost function to work properly, I need the network's outputted list of symbols to be mapped to an image. As an example, I need a t character outputted by the network be mapped into the 6x8 pixel space corresponding to the shape of the t. This will happen to each character outputted by the network, and then I will apply the loss to this asci generated image and the original image.
Unfortunately, I do not have a dataset of the consolas regular size 11 characters to do this. I can use snip tool, but this seems too prone to error. Does there exist a dataset of all consolas regular characters? If not, is there a faster and less error prone way to create it than snipping all characters in a jupyter notebook?

Related

What does degraded and undegraded text lines mean?

I have dataset which contains text lines. But some lines are labeled as undegraded and some with degraded.
What does this mean?
When does we need one of both in text recognition?
Degradation:
It means to reduce the quality of an image. It can be done by considering different parameters like: thresholding, jitter, sensitivity and elastic_elongation.

Most efficient way to pull values that may or may not change?

I am not a trained programmer, but I assist in developing/maintaining macros within our VBA-based systems to expedite various tasks our employees do manually. For instance, copying data from one screen to another. By hand, any instance of this could take 30 seconds to 2 minutes, but with a macro, it could take 2-3 seconds.
Most of the macros we develop rely on the ability to accurately pull data as displayed (not from its relative field!) based on a row/column format for each character. As such, we employ the use of a custom command (let's call it, say... Instance.Grab) that pulls what we need from the screen using row x/column y coordinates and the length of what we want to pull. Example, where the we would normally pull a 8 character string from coordinates 1,1:
dim PulledValue as String
PulledValue = Instance.Grab(1,1,8)
If I ran that code on my question so far, the returned value for our macro would have been "I am not"
Unfortunately, our systems are getting their displays altered to handled values of an increased character length. As such, the coordinates of the data we're pulling is getting altered significantly. Rather than go through our macros and change the coordinates and length manually in each macro (which would need to be repeated if the screen formats change again), I'm converting our macros so that any time they need to pull the needed string, we can simply change the needed coordinate/length from a central location.
My question is, what would be the best way to handle this task? I've thought of a few ideas, but want to maximize effectiveness and minimize the time I spend developing it, given my limited programming experience. For the sake of this, let's call what I need to make happen CoorGrab, and where an array is needed, make an array called CoorArray:
1) creating Public Function CoorGrab(ThisField As Variant) -if I did it this way, than I would simply list all the needed coordinate/length sets based on the variant I enter, then pull whichever set as needed using a 3 dimensional array. For instance: CoorGrab(situationA) would return CoorArray(5, 7, 15). This would be easy enough to edit for one of us who know something about programming, but if we're not around for any reason, there could be issues.
2) creating all the needed coordinates in public arrays in the module. I'm not overly familiar with how to implement this, but I think I read up on something called public constants? I kinda like this idea for its simplicity, but am hesitant to use any variable or array as public.
3) creating a .txt file in a shared drive that has all the needed data and a label to identify them, and save it to a shared drive that any terminal can access when running these macros. This would be the easiest for a non-programmer to jump in and edit in case I or one of our other programming-savvy employees aren't available, but it seems like far more work than is needed, and I fear what could happen if the .txt file got a type or accidentally deleted.
Any thoughts on how I should proceed? Are one of the above options inherently better/easier than the others? Or is there another way to handled this situation that I didn't cover? Any info or advice you all can provide would be greatly appreciated!
8/2/15 Note - Should probably mention the VBA is used as part of a terminal emulator with custom applications for the needs of our department. I don't manage the emulator or its applications, nor do I have system admin access; I just create/edit macros used within it to streamline some of the ways our users handle their workloads. Of the three of us who do this, I'm the least skilled at programming, but also the only on who could be pulled that could update them before the changes take effect.
Your way is not so bad, I would:
Use a string as a label as parameter for CoorGrab
Return a range instead of a string (because you can use a single cell range as text and you keep a trace where your data is)
public CoorGrab(byval label as string) as range
Create an Excel Sheet with 3 rows: 1 = label, 2 = x, 3 = y (you could
add a 4 if you need to search in an other sheet)
CoorGrab() Find the label in the Excel Sheet and return X / Y
If developers aren't availables, they just have to edit the Excel sheet.
You could too create and outsource Excel File to read coordinates outside the local file, or use it to update files of everybody (Read file from server, add/update all label in the server file but not in local file)

LabView: Boolean Array to Number Block TroubleShooting

I am using an EV3 Cube to scan a sheet that represents a binary number; i.e a black line represents a 1 and a white line represents a 0.
Using this, I generate a numeric array consisting of 1's and 0's and convert them by using an Index Array to divide them into a single digit, use a quick comparison (!= 0) to generate their Boolean values, then using the Build Array block, I turn it into a Boolean array.
However, despite this, while using the Convert Boolean Array to Integer block, I receive an error which I do know the reason to.
If anyone could help me, I would be greatful! Thank you.
(By the way, I am a Freshman engineering student with no prior knowledge of LabView, just a year of C++ and 2 years of Java to help me. So thorough explanations would be much easier for me to comprehend)
Attached are pictures of my code along with the error I receive.
Unfortunately the error isn't fully visible as it is truncated in your screenshot,
it would help to either have the code or be able to read the entire message.
But what I'm guessing on what I see is, it says that this is Target Specific error Boolean Array To Number function is not supported.
This could mean that a function you are trying to use that normally is available on PC version of LabVIEW will not work on the target platform ( embedded CPU and OS of your EV3 ).

How to approximate line segments in a grayscale image?

did any one know how to approximate lines from grayscale image resulted from line segment detector: using opencv or C language! in the image attached you see that each finger composed of many lines, what i need to do is to make each finger consists of exactly two parallel lines (i.e. approximate small lines to fit into only one line), if any one helps me, i will appreciate that.
N.B. i'm new to stackocerflow therefore i'm not allowed to post images, so for more clarification, that's the link of the image.
http://www.2shared.com/photo/Ff7mFtV3/Optimal.html
grayscale image resulted from line segment detector (LSD)
What have you done so far? You might need some heuristics. First add all segments on a table, try calculating the inclination of each of the segments and then sorting them by this as index. Afterwards, consider all segments that have an inclination say close by 5% or something to have the exact same inclination. This will induce a partitioning in the table. You might want to draw them using different colors so that you find the perfect parameter value.
Now you need to 'merge' all segments that have the same inclination and are close together. I'd try to measure the distance between the segments (google an algorithm for that) and sort the segments of each partition according to this. Consider merging segments that are close by less than, for instance, 3% of the total image height in pixels or something (find that empirically).
Last step, merging the segments should be very easy compared to the rest.
If you really want to find the fingers, you can stop earlier and compare the groups of same inclination to check if there are two almost (by 7% or so) parallel. The 5 closest pairs of inclinations should be fingers :-)

Loading tiles for a 2D game

Im trying to make an 2D online game (with Z positions), and currently im working with loading a map from a txt file. I have three different map files. One contains an int for each tile saying what kind of floor there is, one saying what kind of decoration there is, and one saying what might be covering the tile. The problem is that the current map (20, 20, 30) takes 200 ms to load, and I want it to be much much bigger. I have tried to find a good solution for this and have so far come up with some ideas.
Recently I'v thought about storing all tiles in separate files, one file per tile. I'm not sure if this is a good idea (it feels wrong somehow), but it would mean that I wouldn't have to store any unneccessary tiles as "-1" in a text file and I would be able to just pick the right tile from the folder easily during run time (read the file named mapXYZ). If the tile is empty I would just be able to catch the FileNotFoundException. Could anyone tell me a reason for this being a bad solution? Other solutions I'v thought about would be to split the map into smaller parts or reading the map during startup in a BackgroundWorker.
Try making a much larger map in the same format as your current one first - it may be that the 200ms is mostly just overhead of opening and initial processing of the file.
If I'm understanding your proposed solution (opening one file per X,Y or X,Y,Z coordinate of a single map), this is a bad idea for two reasons:
There will be significant overhead to opening so many files.
Catching a FileNotFoundException and eating it will be significantly slower - there is actually a lot of overhead with catching exceptions, so you shouldn't rely on them to perform application logic.
Are you loading the file from a remote server? If so, that's why it's taking so long. Instead you should embed the file into the game. I'm saying this because you probably take 2-3 bytes per tile, so the file's about 30kb and 200ms sounds like a reasonable download time for that size of file (including overhead etc, and depending on your internet connection).
Regarding how to lower the filesize - there are two easy techniques I can think of that will decrease the filesize a bit:
1) If you have mostly empty squares and only some significant ones, your map is what is often referred to as 'sparse'. When storing a sparse array of data you can use a simple compression technique (formally known as 'run-length encoding') where each time you come accross empty squares, you specify how many of them there are. So for example instead of {0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,2,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1} you could store {10 0's, 1, 1, 2, 3, 12 0's, 1}
2) To save space, I recommend that you store everything as binary data. The exact setup of the file mainly depends on how many possible tile types there are, but this is a better solution than storing the ascii characters corresponding to the base-10 representation of the numers, separated by delimiters.
Example Binary Format
File is organized into segments which are 3 or 4 bytes long, as explained below.
First segment indicates the version of the game for which the map was created. 3 bytes long.
Segments 2, 3, and 4 indicate the dimensions of the map (x, y, z). 3 bytes long each.
The remaining segments all indicate either a tile number and is 3 bytes long with an MSB of 0. The exception to this follows.
If one of the tile segments is an empty tile, it is 4 bytes long with an MSB of 1, and indicates the number of empty tiles including that tile that follow.
The reason I suggest the MSB flag is so that you can distinguish between segments which are for tiles, and segments which indicate the number of empty tiles which follow that segment. For those segments I increase the length to 4 bytes (you might want to make it 5) so that you can store larger numbers of empty tiles per segment.

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