dance2ps

A simple program to produce step charts from step files of pydance, StepMania, and DWI.

Features

• Reads .dance, .dwi, and .sm formats.
• Can display 4-, 6-, and 8-panel steps, double and couple mode.
• Formats and outputs song information.
• Outputs PostScript aiming to conform to PostScript Document Structuring Convention
• Splits long songs into multiple letter-sized pages.
• Should run on any operating system on which Python runs. (Report any observations to the contrary, please.)

Todo

• Handle 5-panel steps (i.e. Pump It Up)
• A legend for the resulting PostScript documents. (Most of it is self-explanatory. For the rest, the bars on the side of each column with steps have 1 sec ticks; black vertical lines are stops; gray vertical lines are waits.)

Requirements

Dance2ps requires Python version 2.2 or later. It does not require pydance, but you should try it anyway.

Downloading dance2ps

You can download the files of dance2ps 1.0 in zip, gzip, or bzip2 format. Latest version should be at http://students.washington.edu/levap/DDR/dance2ps.html, at least until I graduate from University of Washington, which will be at least four years.

Installing dance2ps

Simply extract the archive you downloaded anywhere, as long as all the .py files are in the same directory.

Running dance2ps

At the command prompt, get the usage information by typing the following:

python /PATH/TO/DANCE2PS/dance2ps.py --help

replacing /PATH/TO/DANCE2PS/ with the directory to which you extracted it.

Feedback, ideas, and bug reports

Any of the above are welcome, as are code contributions. This page has information how to contact me. For bug reports, please include the offending step file.

You can also find me on IRC in #pyddr on irc.freenode.net . I use the nick “Pavel”.

Some disclaimers

“PostScript” is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Dance2ps uses some modules of pydance. It is not, however, a part of pydance. Do not blame pydance developers for any problems with it, because they did not intend to have the file parsing code to be used this way, but do thank them for it if it does work.