Whiptips craft advice column for readers to ask questions or offer advice by leaving comments. Whiptips archive here. Questions to whiptips@gmail.com.
Lucy from my byrd house writes in asking for advice on digitising patterns…
I have several patterns on paper now that I would like to publish but don’t have a clue how to get them digitized or what software to buy to do it myself.
Thanks for any imput.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
My advice would be to hire a good graphic designer. We use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign for our patterns, but it’s a steep learning curve if you’ve never used this softwae before. The other advantage to hiring a graphic designer is that he/she can help you organize the information in a way that makes it easier and more appealing to potential buyers. Don’t underestimate the importance of a great photograph as well! Good luck!
I create the layout for my knitting patterns myself by just rearranging things on Microsoft Word. I looked at other standard knitting pattern layouts first and then developed the style that I am going to be using throughout the rest of them to come. Once happy I convert it to a PDF. (You can do this on the Internet or you can buy software for it.)
Going off of Anushka’s comment, there are a few free ways to convert to PDFs – there’s a “print to PDF” thing that you can do, here’s one: http://www.dopdf.com/ I used to use a different one so I don’t know how good this one is, but it’s basically the same concept. When you go to print it, but instead of selecting your actual physical printer, you choose the PDF-creator and it exports to PDF for you.
OpenOffice is a suite like Microsoft Office Suite except it’s open source and free. The only downside is that unless you’re on highspeed, downloading is going to be a pain in the ass. When you work on a document or whatever, it allows you to Export to PDF also.
lucy, if you plan to present your patterns for printing, you need a rastor to vector convertor. the one i use is wintopo but there are several others on the market. the main thing you are looking for is the ability to convert from TIF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP etc formats to CAD, GIS and CNC applications.
Hi,
Have a look at our digitised patterns on the site and you can see the amount of work required to get them up.
If you want them to be done, I could organise for you.
Regards, Damian:)