1. About

Shoebox is a pure Python version/rewrite of Nodebox, a Mac OS X application developed by Frederik Bleser and Tom de Smedt at St. Lucas University in Antwerp, Belgium, from the DrawBot application developed by Just van Rossum.

Shoebox uses the Cairo graphics engine for rendering, and instead of a full-fledged GUI it provides a simple command-line interface and the ability to be called from external Python scripts without effort.

Shoebox also borrows from the principles outlined in the Little Coder's Predicament, a manifesto by the author of Shoes, which is a similar and awesome project using the Ruby language instead of Python.

Shoebox can read scripts in the Nodebox language and output images in SVG, PostScript, PDF or PNG format.

Comparing to graphics coding alternatives like Nodebox and Processing, Shoebox ends up being lighter and more flexible, thanks to not depending on an interface engine for rendering, and thus making it potentially suitable for CPU-conscious uses like server applications. Unlike Processing and Nodebox though, Shoebox can only output still images for the time being.

Shoebox can be run stand-alone or as part of a Python program - see the Getting Started page for more details. There's a lot of stuff that is still subject to change and/or not working as it should - please regard it as being in a very early alpha phase -, but we're coding and typing hard to solve this!

It should run on most GNU/Linux systems. It was also successfully tested on a Mactel running OSX. No Windows version is planned though - let us know if you can help us with this ;o)

Shoebox is free software, distributed under the GPLv3. Check the source on Trac and share the love \o/

2. Installation

For downloading and installing instructions, head over to the Download+Install page.

3. Documentation

Documenting Shoebox is still an ongoing (and boring) effort :)

Still, you can browse the - rather messy - Shoebox API reference (in PyDoc format) or check the Nodebox reference.

4. Contact

Shoebox's author can be reached at r "at" sollec "dot" org.