Charting (on a mac) for Cheapskates
The people have spoken, so here it is – how I create my knitting charts using 100% free software. Some of this requires some technical knowledge, and I’m doing all of this on a mac, so your mileage may vary.
If you’re really serious about charting, you’d probably be best dropping the money for a program that does all the hard work for you. I downloaded the trial version of Knit Visualizer, and it looks very good. The main reason I’m using these tools (besides cost) is that I really wanted to use some of my own symbols in these charts.
Step 1: Download a knitting font
There are a few free options for knitting fonts out there:
1. Knitter’s Symbol fonts, from Knitter’s magazine.
2. The fonts on the knittingsoftware yahoo group. There are two – JKnit and LaceKnit.
3. Knitting Font from Aire River Design. Amy told me about this one – I haven’t tried to install it.
Option 1 looks best if you’re charting something with cables – I don’t think there are many cable options in the knittingsoftware fonts. However, I’m adapting a chart from a Japanese pattern book, so I chose to start with the JKnit font.
There’s one last issue with the knittingsoftware fonts – they are Windows-only. We’ll need a converter to get them working on the mac. Enter FontForge.
Step 2: Macify the font and add extra symbols, if necessary
If you’re a mac user spoiled by the pretty UI, you’ll hate Font Forge. However, it’s extremely useful for converting a windows font to mac format. There has to be a better, free way of doing this, but I haven’t looked in to it in depth – I stumbled upon Font Forge when looking for a font editing program and got the font converting portion for free. If you know of a better method, let me know!
If you’re using a mac font and don’t need extra symbols, then you can skip this step.
Font Forge has a few dependencies to get it installed. First, you’ll need X11. It comes on the OSX install discs, or you can also download it from the developer area of the mac website. If you’re creating font symbols, you’ll also need some sort of image library so that you can import a picture of your symbol in the background. I used Fink to download libpng.
You can find instructions for downloading and installing Font Forge on their website. It comes as a dmg and is straightforward to install. Once it’s installed, you can open the downloaded JKnit font, then do a File > Generate Fonts, and select ‘TrueType (mac format)’. This creates a dfont file that makes Font Book happy.
If you’re editing symbols, then you’ve got a bit of work ahead of you. Font Forge has a pretty decent tutorial to get you started. Font editing is a tedious, anal retentive process. Have fun!
Step 3: Openoffice
This part? So not my idea. There’s excellent instructions on charting with Excel on Fleegle’s blog, and Marnie has a two part series on creating lace charts with excel. One thing I do that’s not mentioned on these tutorials is that I first create a small key of all my special symbols off to the side, then cut-and-paste them into place on my chart. I find that much easier dealing with the Special Character dialog for any length of time.
Openoffice is free but the mac port definitely a work in progress. There’s lots of quirks, like you can only open a file via File > Open (can’t double-click a file to open it), the application quits when you close the last open window, etc etc. It also crashes occasionally, but I’ve never lost data – they have built in a good file recovery mechanism. Whatever, it’s free and it works.
Hopefully someone finds this information useful!
RSS
so checking all of this out. i really want to get this lace chart i’m working on more functional! :D
The Mac Port has already fixed many of the problems in the current publicly announced release. This includes the about file opening problem.
neat idea for working around free software!
oh yes! thats mighty helpful and wonderful too. I was using open office on the mac but using slashes and letters for the charting meaning I had to add a key and only I could understand what I was doing at the time.
you’re a star!
Thanks! This is so helpful. Always glad to see another mac user :D
Wow Kelly, who knew you were such a geek? I love it!! This is very useful to me, and thanks for the Mac user heads up!
Thank you for this wonderful infomation, K!
I hope that my non-techy self will be able to make it all work!!
Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m stuck trying to figure out what that big loopy symbol means.
(is it a right-over-left two-stitch cable knit through the back loop?)
Oh my god….. thanks!!! So, which one are you saying is free and which one will work on a Windows PC? I got a little confused.
That’s amazing! I am lucky I can mostly read a chart, let alone create one. I can’t wait for your sock chart to be ready for public consumption.
I used to use the Knitter’s font with great success and happiness on my old mac (the one that belonged to my former employer–shh! don’t tell them I used it for personal stuff) But I cannot use it on my new-ish MacBookPro. Can you fix it for me? :) I’ll hand over my computer to your capable hands.
But seriously, I’m not needing to chart anything right now. But if I do…I’m going over to your house. That’s more fun than using the PC.
Thank you for such a great Mac knitting tutorial. They are very rare as I’m sure you well know.
My last blog entry uses the free Knitters Font for a free cabled Baby Blanket I designed for both hand and machine knitters, using an iMac and Apple’s iWeb software. The Knitters Font works as advertised on a mac, but since you are essentially typing letters that represent knitting symbols, it is not the most user friendly. Knitting charts are read from the bottom right corner moving up, English is written from the top left corner moving down.
I will definitely refer back to this post before the next time I tackle charts for my blog
Kathryn
Wow. Useful and I actually had no idea you could do this at all.
Thanks for the great tutorial! I’ll definitely try this on my Mac. For charts you can also use Neo Office (instead of open office), it works (especially starting the program and saving, in my opinion/mac) faster and doesn’t run on X11 but is native in Mac.
Link for Neo Office got dropped off for some reason: http://www.neooffice.org/
This is a test!
Great tips — thanks!
I’m a little late to the party here, but I’m so excited to see this post! I’m planning on writing up some patterns and this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!