This command line program renders Nonogram puzzles to GIF files. It provides a range of options to control the look of the output animation.

Nonograms (also known as Paint by Numbers, Picross, and Pixel Puzzles, amongst others) are a form of puzzle where the object is to use clues to fill in the cells in a grid to reveal a picture. The clues are provided as a series of numbers for each row and column, indicating the length of groups of contiguous cells along that line that may be filled in.

This is not a clever or efficient solver. It simply tries every possible option for every line until the puzzle is complete.

I made it because I was given a Nonogram in a Christmas card and I thought it would be fun to write a program to solve it, and send my friend a GIF of the solution. The above animation was generated by solving the nonogif.yaml puzzle with the following command:

nonogif \
    --delay 20 \
    --style detail \
    --final-delay 1000 \
    --output docs/nonogif.gif \
    test/data/nonogif.yaml

• Basic Nonogram solver.
• Reads YAML format input file.
• Command line interface.
• Configurable GIF output.
  • Options to animate line by line, pass by pass or simply render the final result to a non-animated GIF.
  • Options to control animation behaviour, e.g. inter frame delays.
  • Options to control appearance, e.g. grid size, border thickness and colours.

• libcgif: GIF encoding.
• libcyaml: YAML loading.

On a Debian or Ubuntu system, install them with:

sudo apt-get install libcgif-dev libcyaml-dev

Simply run

make

By default a release build is built. To build a debug or sanitizer variant, set VARIANT accordingly:

make VARIANT=debug
make VARIANT=sanitizer