Creating letters with satin fill

Adriti

Hello Matthias, can you show me how to create some letters with a Zigzag stitch ?

All I can do when I try to create some letters is to fill inside, not to follow a "central" line, as I can see in your exemple in the videos…

Sorry If the answer always exist…

Adrien

Matthias

Adriti All I can do when I try to create some letters is to fill inside, not to follow a "central" line, as I can see in your exemple in the videos…

Hi Adrien! Here you are mistaken: In my video - I‘m assuming this one - the stitches don‘t follow a „central“ line. StitchBuddy can only fill a letter with Tatami patterns or follow its outline (contour) with stitches.

You might think of a satin fill, which is curved like the stroking path of a letter, limited by the contour (similar to the „Welcome“ text of StitchBuddy)? That‘s not possible for two reasons:

So far I wasn‘t able to come up with a smart user interface for defining a satin fill (which needs additional information, like two limiting paths and rungs). This topic is one of the dozens of items on my todo list. But even this feature won‘t allow you to automatically create letters with a satin fill following their stroke, because…
Text fonts of your Mac don‘t have the information of their stroke. For example think of a „t“: There is no information that this letter is basically constructed by two strokes, the first a vertical line, crossed by a second horizontal one. That‘s just not how True Type Fonts are stored, and without this information nobody can automatically stitch these letters. There are some highly complex algorithms to determine a letter’s stroke, but these are always approximations working on assumptions, and basically that’s more a theoretical discussion.

A very good question and interesting topic. Actually I spent some time investigating auto-stroking letters before I implemented the current solution - which is only a compromise, but might be enhanced with (manually defined) satin stitches in the future…

Edit: I'll move this discussion into "Improvements" (due to the satin fill part) and add a corresponding hint to its title. Hopefully that's okay for you 🙂

shamie1999

I would absolutely love this feature. Even if there was a way to import a SVG of letters in a specific way to have it satin filled. I made some ith ornaments with purchased designs and added the satin edge and letters. turned out OK but letter improvements would have made them perfect 🙂

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4SKSqtvQjhJwxjHg8

Matthias

shamie1999

shamie1999 Even if there was a way to import a SVG of letters in a specific way to have it satin filled.

100% agree: I'm considering satin columns as a further improvement, using the node method to define a fill between two bezier curves with the same number of nodes. This InkStitch article is providing a good description.

Currently it's only a rough idea in its early stage, requiring e. g. tools to indicate and revert path directions, and to split shapes (like letters) in paths. First I need to focus on some internal improvements, but this topic is prominent on my todo list!