I needed a graphic of a flag that I could scale to whatever size I needed. About 10 minutes of Postscript hacking with the specifications in Wikipedia yielded the following results:
Sadly, the syntax highlighter that I have here doesn’t know about PostScript, so I’ll just have to add it here.
%!PS % % % PostScript program for generating an image of the US Flag % Generated by implementing the specifications which are listed on % the wikipedia page: % % http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States#Specifications % % by Mark VandeWettering /inch {72 mul} def /Hoist 1.0 def /Fly 1.9 def /UnionHoist Hoist 7 mul 13 div def /UnionFly Fly 2 mul 5 div def /WidthStripe Hoist 13 div def /F 0.054 def /G 0.063 def /StarDiameter 0.0616 def /StarRadius StarDiameter 2 div def % When a regular pentagon is inscribed in a circle with radius R, its % edge length t is given by the expression: % t = 2 R sin(pi / 5) % PostScript does sin in degrees, so we need 180 instead... /StarSide StarDiameter 36 sin mul def /StarDiagonal StarSide 5 sqrt 1 add 2 div mul def /white {1 1 1 setrgbcolor} def /red {0.698 .132 .203 setrgbcolor} def /blue {0.234 0.233 0.430 setrgbcolor} def % draw a star at the cursor position... /stardiagonal { StarDiagonal 0 lineto currentpoint translate -144 rotate } def /star { gsave exch StarDiagonal 2 div sub exch StarRadius 18 sin mul add moveto currentpoint translate 4 { stardiagonal } repeat closepath fill grestore } def % draw the border... /Flag { gsave 0.001 setlinewidth Fly 2 div neg Hoist 2 div neg translate 0 0 Fly Hoist rectstroke % paint in the bg, just in case white 0 0 Fly Hoist rectfill % paint in the red stripes... red 1 2 13 { 1 sub WidthStripe mul 0 exch Fly WidthStripe rectfill } for % draw in the union... blue 0 Hoist UnionHoist sub UnionFly UnionHoist rectfill % now, the stars, easiest to do in two passes. gsave 0 Hoist UnionHoist sub translate white 1 2 9 { /y exch def 1 2 11 { /x exch def x G mul y F mul star } for } for 2 2 8 { /y exch def 2 2 10 { /x exch def x G mul y F mul star } for } for grestore grestore } def 8.5 inch 2 div 11.0 inch 2 div translate 4 inch dup scale Flag showpage quit
Enjoy.
Addendum:
Oh, incidently, you can use The Gimp to convert this from PostScript to a normal graphics format like the PNG file above. It will even do some antialiasing to make the jaggies look better. Very nice.