Lettering

Lettering Tool

The text module creates multi-line text. Choose the right font for your project from a wide variety of pre-digitized fonts.

Lettering Extensions

Usage

Run Extensions > Ink/Stitch > Lettering > Lettering
Enter your text (multi-line is possible)
Adjust font family and scaling.
⚠ Warning: For best results please note the limits for scaling in the font description.
Click on Apply and Quit.
Position your text within the svg document.

Font filters

Font size filter

Fonts are designed for a special range of sizes. The font size filter helps you to reduce the font list to only the fonts fitting to your target size. A active font filter (not 0) will set the correct scale value when you select a font.
Glyphs

If checked only the fonts that contain all the glyphs of your text are listed
Font categories

Filter the fonts by categories, for example get only the applique fonts or only the script fonts

Options

Scale

Defines the output size of the font compared to the original font size (%). It is recommended to use the scale option, rather than resizing the font on canvas. This way you can make sure, that you stay within the parameters the font has been designed for.
Color sort

This feature will be part of an upcoming Ink/Stitch release. It is not yet integrated in Ink/Stitch.

Sort colors of multicolor fonts to avoid a huge amount of color changes.
Stitch lines of text back and forth

With this option enabled the first line will be stitched from left to right and the second from right to left, etc. This will give your machine shorter ways to travel.
Align Text

This feature will be part of an upcoming Ink/Stitch release. It is not yet integrated in Ink/Stitch.

Align multiline text: left, center, right, block (default), block (letterspacing)
Add trims

Adds TRIM commands according to the chosen option (Never, after each line, after each word, after each letter).
Use command symbols

When adding trims, use command symbols. Uses the trim param setting otherwise.

Presets

You can save and load your favourite font settings.

Lettering along path

Ink/Stitch letters are carefully designed. If you try to transform them with common tools, they may not work as expected. This means placing letters along a path will be a lot of work. Therefore we’ve created a tool to assist you with that.

A text aligned along a path while using the various options

Usage

Select a path and a lettering group
Run Extensions > Ink/Stitch > Lettering > Lettering along path ...
If stretch is enabled, Ink/Stitch will stretch the spaces in between the letters, so that the text will use the entire path. Otherwise it will keep the distances from the original text.
Click on apply

Lettering will follow the path direction. Reverse the path if needed (Path > Reverse).

Font library

An overview of available fonts can be found it the font library.

Color Sorting

When embroidering several letters, you may wish to color sort to avoid many changes of thread. When the colors appear in the same order in every letter and when each color is only used on consecutive paths within a letter (this is true for all multicolor Ink/Stitch fonts, with the exception of Infinipicto) this is how to quickly color sort a lettering:

Pick a letter in the objects panel
Select the first-to-be-embroidered path of this letter (last one for this letter in the objects panel)
Edit/Select same/ Same color stroke
Group, this group will end up in the last to embroider letter
Move this group to the top of in its letter

repeat until all the colors are grouped, always starting with selecting the last path of a letter.

Batch Lettering

This feature will be part of an upcoming Ink/Stitch release. It is not yet integrated in Ink/Stitch.

Batch lettering allows to easily create multiple text files.

A patch with four different names

Prepare a design file. If the file contains a path with the label batch lettering it will be used for the text position. It will work the same say as Lettering Along Path.
Go to File > Save a copy... and click on the little arrow on the file format selection field to open a list of available file formats.
Choose Ink/Stitch: batch lettering (.zip)
Navigate to your desired output folder and click on Save

Options

Text: Enter the text, by default each new line will be placed in it’s own file
Custom Separator: Defaults to new lines. Specify an other separator if you wish that your text file has multiline text. The text will be split and placed into a new file with every occurence of the custom separator.
Font name: The name of the font you wish to use. Have a look at the font library to find a list of available fonts
Scale (%): Scale value to resize a font. The value will be clamped to the available scale range of the specific font.
Color sort: Wether multicolor fonts should be color sorted or not
Add trims: Wether trims should be added or not (never, after each line, word or letter)
Use command symbols: Wether the trims should be added as command symbols or as a param option (only relevant for svg output)
Align Multiline Text: Define how multiline text should be aligned
Lettering along path: text position: The text position on the batch lettering path
File formats: Enter a comma separated list of file formats

Command line usage

Here is a minimal example for command line usage of the batch lettering extension

./inkstitch --extension=batch_lettering --text="Hello\nworld" --font="Abecedaire" --file-formats="svg,dst" input_file.svg > output_file.zip

Options

Option	Input Type	Values
`--text`	string	cannot be empty
`--separator`	string	default: ‘\n’
`--font`	string	must be a valid font name
`--scale`	integer	default: 100
`--color-sort`	string	off, all, line, word default: off
`--trim`	string	off, line, word, glyph default: off
`--command_symbols`	bool	default: False
`--text-align`	string	left, center, right, block, letterspacing default: left
`--file-formats`	string	must be at least one valid output format

Create new fonts for Ink/Stitch

Read the font creation tutorial.

Sample Files Including Lettering

Using distort path effects

Using distort paths effects