Fechtkarte

A drill card generator for Historical European Martial Arts, built on a cutting-diagram notation credited to Joachim Meyer's 16th-century fencing teaching.

A card is a rectangle crossed by eight rays. A numbered disc marks where a cut starts; a dot below it means thrust instead. The background colour tells you which hand to use. Follow the numbers.

Everything else — edge, guard, footwork, tempo — is left to the practitioner. That is the point: the card sets the pattern, you supply the fencing.

Browse more than 100 classic cards, generate unlimited random drills, and export or share them as PNG or vector PDF. Works offline, in English, German and French. See FEATURES.md for what the app does.

What is here

Path	Contents
FEATURES.md	What the app does, feature by feature
CONTRIBUTING.md	How to build, test and submit changes
CLAUDE.md	Coding conventions and the development workflow this project follows
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md	Community standards for contributors
SECURITY.md	How to report a vulnerability
docs/PALETTE.md	The card palette and its verification
docs/ASSET_PROVENANCE.md	Licence register — every shipped asset
PRIVACY_POLICY.md	What the app stores, and what it does not
PLAY_DATA_SAFETY.md	Google Play's Data Safety disclosure, and why every category is "not collected"
data/original_cards.json	The classic drill cards
tools/	Palette verification and image-generation scripts, Python

Building

The host needs only a container runtime (Podman or Docker). No Android SDK, no JDK, no Gradle install.

./scripts/build.sh

That runs gradle clean build inside the image, so a successful image build is a successful verification. Per CLAUDE.md, no commit lands without one. For a faster inner loop while writing a test, see scripts/test.sh.

Verify the palette (light and dark theme):

python tools/palette/verify_palette.py
python tools/palette/verify_dark_palette.py

The classic cards

data/original_cards.json ships more than 100 classic drill cards in a notation credited to Joachim Meyer's 16th-century fencing teaching. The Library screen presents them as distinct drills with a hand toggle, plus a set of technique cards, rather than as one long flat list.

Sourcing and originality

Each drill action is a short numeric record — a direction, a distance from centre, a sequence position, a thrust flag — not narrative or pictorial expression. Name, artwork, palette, typography and copy are all original — see docs/ASSET_PROVENANCE.md, which records the licence and origin of every asset the app ships.

How this app is built

Fechtkarte is developed with AI assistance — an AI coding agent writes and reviews much of the code, documentation and translations, working from the conventions in CLAUDE.md under human direction and review.

Two things follow from that, and both are deliberate. Every change goes through the same gate regardless of who or what wrote it: tests first, then a full containerised build that runs the entire suite — nothing lands red. And decisions get written down with their reasoning rather than just their outcome, which is why this repository carries as much prose as it does.

Licence

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Credits

The cut-and-thrust notation is credited to Joachim Meyer (1537–1571).