All:
I have had an idea since my sophmore year in highschool that I have never been able to get very far with. The idea is to graphically see similarities in numbers. The idea is to create a square spiral outward where you either print the number if the number has a given property or leave it empty if it doesn't. You can do this on transparencies so that you can overlap different properties to see similarities.

For instance even numbers where A=10, B=11, C=12:

789A
612B
543C

will yield

 x x
x x 
 x x

You can do this for all sorts of properties (prime, even, odd, square, triangular number, etc). My problem is figuring out how to be able to go very high with my numbers. I want to be able for the program to be able to figure out how many rectangular pieces of paper/transparencies are needed to have a square centered in it and what to print on each page so that they can be taped together after.

I only have very poorly written QBasic code that shows how I created the spiral back then and I don't have the first clue as to how to convert QBasic's locate to Perl or how to be able to spread the output correctly onto multiple pages.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers - L~R