Creating embroidery fonts with Inkscape

[svg2embr]

I have been working a bit on creating fonts via Inkscape and was thinking that it would be fun to create fonts working for embroidery in ttf format on the concept of single line fonts. I know ttf fonts is by definition closed fonts, but there is a way around by opening the closed paths f.x. using Inkscape. I have some posts about this in about scrapping.

I am thinking either fonts looking like single line fonts, but defined to be sewn forth and back and forth again to make in more visible (sorry - I do not know the correct term for this type of sewing...). The start and end of the letters would have to be defined so that the distance between the letters is as small as possible so that one would not have to cut the thread between the letters.

I also think it would be possible to define paths for filled letters, but these would not be that easily resizable as the density of the filling will not be able to change.

The last one I guess is a lot(!) of work, but it is fun to play with the idea.

[cooperlili]

I read your blog. It is very informative. And about creating embroidery fonts, I usually face problem while digitizing for small embroidery. Smaller lettering is mainly used in logos. So while digitizing for the logo, it creates problems. Can you suggest any solution for it ??

[svg2embr]

I guess that might be a very good and relatively simple (?) project for creating a font for embroidery. I know I've seen this discussed somewhere so I guess one could search for some good hints how to create these fonts as sewable as possible.

[cooperlili]

Thanks for the reply. While searching it on this topic, I found some good information about it at


It includes the information about how tiny letters can be embroidered with the maximum accuracy. It also includes the tips about it. I tried few techniques mentioned in it and it worked really well.

[Tatarize]

While that might kind of work, the bigger problem is that embroidery fonts != fonts. You can certainly make fonts but you cannot be sure they will work well with embroidery unless they are basically specially designed for embroidery. Which is to say they predefine the satin stitches used to make the glyphs, which is itself more information than the glyphs themselves have. Take the letter "A" for example. The raw glyph data will be the outer line of the A. Then inside that in counter-clockwise order the "A-hole". But, how it is embroidered is typically by using a satin stitch, in a rather specific sequence predefined within the embroidery font.



Notice that the font starts in the lower left and ends wrongly in the middle. The point is that the areas are very typically broken down into sweepable polygons and then given a method by which to connect one font element to the next, usually with satin stitches. Which means they often don't fill areas per se, but rather fill a small envelope of area with the typical embroidery adjustments for turns during a satin stitch.

The SVG assignments for glyph objects is going away shortly. It's being removed in SVG 2.0 with preference for WOFF. And all Inkscape is doing there is the kerning of the glyph objects. There's a series of rather major stumbling blocks here.

Embroidery fonts typically define not simply the outline, but how the object can be filled with stitches travelling in a particular path, and how to connect the disjointed path areas together. Not simply at the letter level but also the word. There are a number of embroidery fonts which also define where and how the jump to the next letter can be made, with minimum distance.

It's for a lot of these reasons that my own implementations of this stuff simply has at most a programmable stitch that can be used to write letters in a given sequence.



It's actually a lot more to embroidery fonts than there are to standard truetype fonts. In the former case it must encode in what order should one do the positive elements of the font and how. You could likely get the glyph data, and sew the outline of them. Or maybe get an SVG program to not save the font data in the SVG but rather display the actual glyphs themselves and thereby sew the outline, with an unreasonable number of very short stitch sequences and cuts.