Instructions
Disclaimer: Not designed for touchscreens. Not tested on touchscreens.
Polygonal monotile applet
The applet allows testing tilings with one polygonal tile that can be rotated into N possible orientations, and can also be flipped.
Controls
- Summon a tile in an empty hand by clicking an empty space in the area
- Glue a tile in hand by left-clicking in the area. Shift-left click leaves a copy in hand.
- Duplicate a placed tile by right-clicking it with an empty hand.
- Turn the tile in the hand by one turn over N with either:
the mouse wheel; the left/right arrow keys while the cursor is above the canvas; the turn buttons.
- Reflect the tile in the hand with a right click or the flip button or the keyboard "/", "-", "f" or "m".
- Erase a tile under the cursor with left click with the eraser tool, or with the hand tool with Shift-Alt-left click. The hand tool with Alt-left click will erase the tile in hand if it is not empty, otherwise the tile under the hand. You can also erase a tile as follows: picked it up with left button, maintain left button pressed and click right mouse button.
- There are 4 tools, you can select them by clicking on their buttons or cycle through them with the up/down arrow keys while the cursor is above the canvas, or with Alt-wheel, or by pressing the key between parentheses: place/move tile (t), delete tile (e), paint tile (p), pan/zoom (z).
- From any tool different from the hand a right click goes back to the hand tool.
- You can select a colour using the palette or with shift-wheel.
- You can change the coulour of a tile by picking it with the hand tool and using shift-wheel or by clicking it with the paint tool or using the wheel while hovering it with the paint tool.
- With the zoom tool you pan with left mouse button drag and zoom in/out with the wheel. From any tool middle mouse button drag allows panning and Ctrl-wheel zooming.
- There may be a few other special mouse behaviours not documented here.
- Change the value of N with the corresponding input field. Note that this will mess up your tiling unless all preivous orientations match an appropriate multiple of the new angle.
Overlap is not prevented
There is no overlap checking implemented.
Magnet (snapping)
The vertices of the already placed tiles are used to snap the current tile being placed: this tile is translated according to the closest vertex pair, provided their distance is below some threshold. The threshold value can be adjusted in the corresponding input field.
Custom polygon
The monotile can be changed into any polygon traced by a single closed polygonal line: use the "Load shape" button. The file should be a text file containing a list of the shape vertices in the form [[0,1.23],[3.1,13],[-3.14,2.505]] for instance. Be careful that the rotation centre will be [0,0]. You can recentre the cursor to the barycenter of the tile with the "Recentre shape" button.
Another file type understood by the app is {"nbAngles":12,"shape":[[0,1.23],[3.1,13],[-3.14,2.505]]} where nbAngles denotes a recommended value of the number N of orientations, that will be set when you load the tile.
Saving/Loading tilings
Saves a data file containing tile shape, number N of orientations, position and colour of tiles.