Creating a Checkerboard Image

QUESTION: It is sometimes useful to have a checkerboard image for various image processing and image masking tasks. Is there an easy way to create such an image in IDL? I've written such a function, but I'm embarrassed to show it to anyone. I'm pretty sure its not written in the “IDL Way.”

ANSWER: Who else but JD Smith provided us with an example of how to do this in the IDL Way.

   nx = 300
   ny = 200
   nrects = 10
   xside = nx/nrects
   yside = ny/nrects 
   board = lindgen(nx,ny)
   board  = (board mod (xside*2) lt xside) XOR (board/nx mod (yside*2) ge yside)

You can see the result in the figure below.

   IDL> TVScale, board, /NOINTERP

The checkerboard image created the IDL Way.

 

There are a couple of other caveats to worry about with this. For example, the number of squares you want should always be an even number. With these in mind, I have written a function named Checkerboard that allows you to create a checkerboard image of any size with a specified number of boxes. By default, the function defaults to the eight boxes on a side for a real checkerboard.