When you have an itch to scratch….
What do you do when you have an itch to scratch, and you can’t reach it? You get someone else to help. Yes, I have an itch that I’d dearly love to scratch, but I simply don’t have the skills. Here’s the problem.
Sewing Machine
You can buy additional patterns on the Internet – and I often do. Each pattern contains the instructions to the machine to embroider the design, but it also contains a thumbnail image. What I’d really like is to have a native Linux application that reads the image part from each file in a directory and displays them as a catalogue, rather like a Dolphin icon-view with previews enabled. In fact if it could be added into Dolphin I’d love it.
While what I can afford to pay would not pay the whole cost of development, there are possibilities for further income. There are about 10 different machine formats, but I suspect that the part of the pattern that describes the thumbnail will be the same in each one, so variations on the software could easily be made. If a developer also could write a Windows version I suspect that there would be a sale for that too – the disk I talked about earlier has some advanced machine programs and is thus very expensive. There are free examples of the machine formats on the Internet and I could help get it publicised on the web sites that sell patterns and in a machine-embroidery magazine.
If you fancy a break from your normal work, why not look at the design of the month at http://www.advanced-embroidery-designs.com/freedesign.html, particularly the JEF format, and see just how feasible this is?
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I guess it would help if you could indeed point out some kind of file format specification, so it would be possible to look how complicated the format is. It is difficult to disect a format based on nothing more than an example file.
You will need to give the developer the file specification.
I find this: http://www.achatina.de/sewing/main/TECHNICL.HTM for some specifications (pes, dst,… ), but jef is not included.
Do you have a link with the jef file specification?
That could come in useful if we ever manage to get this off the ground – it opens up possibilities for converting to other formats, making the proposed solution useful to a wider audience.
Looking at a few JEF files, it looks like it’s fairly easy to get a simple representation of a pattern. The biggest problem will be matching the colours. I’ll put some code up somewhere later on this weekend.
There are quite a lot of distinct colours in the range, but for this purpose that isn’t really an issue. You probably need quite a limited range, since you are only intending giving an impression. Dark red and light red, for instance. The idea is to be able to simply browse to pick out a pattern to look at in detail. That part would be in the proprietary software – defining the exact colours, as well as stitch formation. Does that help?
Following some experiments:
http://bitbucket.org/dboddie/python-showjef/overview/
I’d love to see a program that can create crochet patterns. But this only exists for windows. I’d love to find a “victim” that wants to create an open source crochet pattern creator 🙂
What size are the thumbnails – how many pixels width and height?
What are the likely number of colours, is it 16 primary colours, or are shades of grey – is it like a photo of the design, or more like a drawing (on squared paper)?
Are the thumbnails always the same size and shape?
Looking at the .JEF files:
I cannot see any room for a thumbnail in the file or any data that might be it.
There was a preview for MacOS X (that does cover-flow).
The file format seems to be a header of mainly 32 bit little-endian values followed by a list of 16 bit stitches.
The header (32bit values):
length of header
1 if date/time
date in ASCII
time in ASCII
number of colours, may be
number of stitches
0
width times 0.02cm, may be
height times 0.02cm, may be
width or start smaller than above width
height or start
unknown
unknown
unknown
unknown
-1
-1
-1
-1
an object table, may be
13 repeated the number of colours times
The stitches (16 bit values)
some start 80(hex) and seem to be codes, the rest look like pairs of signed 8 bit offsets. The last stitch seems to be 80 10 (hex), first stitch 80 02, colour change 80 01 00 00 (may be).
Somewhere in these files are values for size, shape, colour, sequence, stitch type, stitch density
Sorry for this not being a useful response. Your entry makes me feel that we must return back to free the beginnings: Something like the Jacqward loom, when we have it done, then computers will be entirely free! 🙂
Here is some starter information for someone to program a previewer http://purple-bobby.co.uk/JEFView/
Is something up with the comments – they don’t show in FireFox – or is something wrong with FireFox?
Here is some starter information for someone to program a previewer http://purple-bobby.co.uk/JEFView/
Apologies to all. First family problems, then my ISP migrating servers, mean that I didn’t check my WordPress files early enough. In the hoo-hah I forgot that I would need to approve comments. Your help and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
@purple-bobby – You are quite right that patterns normally start at the centre, then travel, in a few stitches, or a direct shift, to the start of the pattern proper. If you send me your email address I will send you a couple of files that will help with colour identification.
Nice work, purple-bobby! You figured out some of the fields that I didn’t, and presumably vice versa. I can’t believe I didn’t see that there’s plain text date and time information in the header!
The colours don’t really seem to be standardised. I made some guesses based on the text files supplied with many patterns, but also found some useful information on the site Anne referenced, probably in the tutorials on there that include example files and colour charts. There may also have been some useful information on the Janome site – I don’t remember.
I’ll update my code with the information you provided. Maybe we’re close enough to be able to create files that can be used by a machine.
JEF files don’t hold a bitmap representation, you have to process all stitches to draw an image. The easiest way to learn the color codes is to load free designs to a Janome embroidery machine and check the thread colors. BTDT: I think the mentioned Mac OS X Quick Look plugin was my “JEFview” (the name is just coincidence, purple-boddy), now followed by StitchBuddy as an embroidery editor, Quick Look and Spotlight plugin for Mac OS X.
We combined examining free designs and ‘writing a design’ that would use every known colour code in order, so that we could check accuracy. We did find that there are discrepancies between suppliers in colour definitions, but for the most part it worked well.