Knitting fonts

[dragoncrafter]

So I think I want to start making myself some knitting symbol fonts. I don't want to use the existing freely available fonts (from Aire River Design and David Xenakis) because

• They don't have enough symbols to gracefully handle things like "twist 1 left while simultaneously decreasing one stitch", which comes up more and more with the picture-knit

Comments

[kauricat]

The non-fixed-width thing bugs me a lot too, though I like the Aire River symbols better than the other set. Mainly because I have had a hard time figuring out how to produce some of the characters in the Xenakis font. The keyboard shortcuts for how to access them are not available to me. Is that a Mac thing?

I don't know what these are:

LCR
LRC
RCL
RLC

As for suggestions, your list looks pretty complete at first glance. I did notice that it looks like you don't have a symbol for binding stitches. I don't like patterns that call for binding, but I know there are some people who do like them, so you might want the character in your font.

I'm very excited about the prospect of a Dragoncrafter font because you do some of the best cable work I've seen and you are excellent at explaining things. That bodes well for a font, I think. :)

[dragoncrafter]

LRC and so on are my names for the five double decreases (see the link just above). They've got real names of some sort...sometimes...that depend on the writer.

Bind off has been added.

I suspect the non-TeX versions of my fonts will not be as good, sadly, since I don't think TrueType has a "greyscale" feature. Maybe I can do something with thin lines. Also because I don't even own Word or Excel, so I'm not going to be able to make sure they do anything appropriate.

[bronchitikat]

If you don't own Word of Excel you could investigate the Freeware alternatives. They're free - both of cost & bugs, & generally work at least as well, if not better than, the MS alternatives.

[dragoncrafter]

Oh, I've got spreadsheet programs (the ones that come with OpenOffice and AppleWorks) and word processors (ditto) if I ever need them. I just hardly ever use them, and if the popular ones have any quirks when it comes to using weird fonts, I won't know about them.

[juliannajoyful]

I am so glad I saw your post on this. I am puzzling out my first sock design and have started to fall in love with charts and could totally not imagine what symbols could represent the stitches I'm doing in the ARD font. This kind of helps

Oh, random internet stranger, here via knitty. I just started your Cable Net socks. :-)

Knitting symbol fonts

[anonymous]

Hi - saw your question about additional font symbols; have you considered using technical &/or mathematical symbol fonts? Specialized (i.e. self-designed patterns) don't actually HAVE to conform to "everyone else" - I know I've knitted a bunch with symbols I've never seen before, special to the pattern. Anyway, that's my idea. It's a pain to change fonts just for one symbol, I know, but.........how often does it happen? Cut and paste! sstef78@aol.com

[dragoncrafter]

I can tell you that TeX works on Mac OS X 10.4.11; you're looking for Mac TeX.

I've mostly made some fonts to do this; see here. There's a LaTeX package in there, too; I eventually want to add some of the more bizarre cables, and also to add stuff to the documentation. (Examples, a more detailed chart key, that sort of thing.)

The tree in my icon is here.