About this Program

Gnofract 4D is a program for drawing beautiful mathematically-based images known as fractals. See the manual for more details.

The most recent version may be obtained from https://github.com/fract4d/gnofract4d

Examples, screenshots etc are at https://fract4d.github.io/gnofract4d

Basic Installation

Run:

meson setup --prefix ~/.local/ _build
meson compile -C _build

You can then run Gnofract 4D in the local directory:

./gnofract4d

Alternatively to install Gnofract 4D type:

meson install -C _build

You can then run it by clicking on the desktop icon or typing:

gnofract4d

Requirements

Gnofract 4D requires these packages to run:

• Python version 3.9 or higher
• GTK version 4.6 or higher
• PyGObject version 3.29.2 or higher to access GTK from Python
• A C compiler (used at runtime to compile your fractal formulas)

On Debian/Ubuntu, these can be installed with:

sudo apt install gcc gir1.2-gtk-4.0 python3-gi

To build from source you also need:

• Meson and Ninja
• A C++ compiler
• headers for libpng and libjpeg
• Python headers
• glib-compile-resources and optionally xmllint
• pkg-config

On Debian/Ubuntu, these can be installed with:

sudo apt install build-essential libglib2.0-dev-bin libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libpython3-dev libxml2-utils meson pkg-config

If FFmpeg is installed it will be possible to create videos.

On macOS, you can install the dependencies using brew:

brew install librsvg meson python3 pkg-config gtk4 pygobject3 libpng jpeg

Testing

Testing requires pytest for Python 3. In some distributions, 'pytest' is for Python 2. Run

pip3 install pytest

To get the latest.

Run individual tests from the top-level directory using pytest, e.g.: pytest fract4d/test_absyn.py

Optionally, install tox and test with all supported Python versions by running: tox

On macOS you might find an error regarding the number of opened files, you can increase the system limit with ulimit -Sn 10000

Linting

Pylint is being used to detect code that doesn't follow the PEP8 style guide and potentially erroneous code in Python. You can run it in two ways:

• Directly (firstly you should install pylint through pip3):

  $ pip3 install pylint $ ./bin/pylint.sh

• Using docker (same environment as pipeline):

  $ ./docker/bin/run_lint.sh

Generating Documentation

You can only regenerate the docs if you clone the Gnofract 4D git repo - the source dist packages contain the generated docs but not the input files for the generation process. To regenerate the docs:

1. Make sure you're starting from a git clone not a source .zip - you need the files under manual/content
2. The documentation theme is managed in a separate repository and embedded in manual/themes/book as a submodule. Initialize and update it with git submodule update --init
3. Install hugo
   • Ubuntu 18.04 has an older version. Run snap install hugo --channel=extended instead of apt install hugo
   • For macOS you can install with brew install hugo
4. Run ./createdocs.py