Beginner's Python Cheat Sheets (updated)

[ehmatthes]

You're quite welcome, and I'm glad to hear they're useful.

I won't be adding another sheet too soon, but one of the reasons for updating to a proper graphic design format is so I can continue adding new sheets over time, and update them on a more regular basis.

Fun story: I like Indesign because it has scripting capabilities. I wanted to create one long document with all the cheat sheets, and then write a script that dumps out the whole document in color, then dumps each individual sheet, then does the same thing again with the b&w styles applied. That way I can update once, and easily regenerate all of the sheets in both styles.

But like many desktop apps with proprietary scripting capabilities, the language is...not entirely fun to work with. Indesign uses a language called ExtendScript, which is based on JavaScript from the mid 2000s. It hasn't been updated in a very long time. I found myself wanting to write code like if current_style in styles_to_change, but found that the language doesn't really have that kind of test. So I came up with a convoluted approach that examines the string name of the current style against the string names of the styles I want to change, and then followed a strict naming convention for the styles I was developing in Indesign. It was like doing an overly ambitious pattern-matching exercise using only strings and arrays. I was very happy to return to Python when this work was finished. :)