TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 3 285

CrafTEX: Applying TEX, MetaPost, andfriends in crafts

Mari Voipio

Everything started because of my job as a documen-tation manager in high-tech industry: when the wordprocessor gave up on our big fat instruction manualand the purpose-built software wasn’t within budget,we ended up with ConTEXt. The transition periodwasn’t easy, but in time I learned to appreciate thissoftware that does not make assumptions about whatI’m attempting to do.

Thus, when I suddenly found myself with atextile craft book to be translated and prepared forprinting, I thought of ConTEXt. Life happened andthe booklet is still sitting on my desk waiting forits turn, but in the meantime I have learned manyother things about TEX-based systems and startedto exploit their potential in crafts.

The experience has been mind-blowing! I comeup with new implementations almost weekly, al-though I don’t usually try things out until I have areal need for them. I am not a programmer, but Irealize that a computer is especially useful in reduc-ing the tedious repetitiveness of the planning stages.Nothing can ever prepare a crafter to what happenswhen you play with real yarn and real paper andglue, but the “what if that’s lighter blue” and “Iguess this is the wrong font here” process can besignificantly sped up by computer simulation.

I don’t feel complete until I’ve shared my knowl-edge with others. I don’t get many face-to-face op-portunities to do that, so I decided to go online:http://www.lucet.fi. I haven’t had the energyto fight with WordPress about the printing styles,so instead I’m planning to do printer-friendly PDF

instructions with ConTEXt and MetaPost.Besides enhancing my creativity, I also use Con-

TEXt to deal with the boring but necessary parts ofhaving my own little craft business, e.g. for creatingprice lists and business cards. This migration is stillvery much in process, but eventually everything willbe done with ConTEXt and possibly MetaPost, withas few different style definitions as possible.

1 Plain vanilla typesetting

It may seem obvious to many readers that TEX canbe used to typeset craft-related documents just aswell as anything else. However, to me it has beena new world where vector graphics can be insertedas is and the layout is mainly limited by my ownskill, not by what far-away programmers thought I’dneed the software for. While shedding 20 years worthof WYSIWYG workarounds and reverse engineering

HandmadeinFinlandMariVoipio2012www.lucet.fi

this type of bookmarks are commonin paintings, used in Bibles and prayerbooks as well as by learned men instudy.

A detail of The Vision of St Augustin byVittorio Carpaccio 1502

The medieval and Renaissance man-uscripts very seldom had numberedpages. If numbering existed, it got cutoff when the manuscript was bound.Thus, to refer to a certain place ina book, the learned men and pi-ous women of the period often usedmultiple-strand ribbon bookmarks thatwere either fastened directly to the topof the book binding or loose, fastenedonto an anchor - a button, a knot, afabric bolster - on top. The bottomends were finished with e.g. beads ortassels.This far only some 30 medieval or Re-naissance bookmarks are known, thedelicate ribbons preserved by the man-uscript they were used in. However,

Whipcordbraidedmultiple-strandbookmark

Thisbookmarkisinspiredbytwo17th

centurybookmarks,preservedinBiblesfrom1638and1650.Thebookmarkstrandsareroundfour-strandbraids.Theyarebraidedbywrappingthethreadsaroundwoodenbobbinsandquickly"whipping"thebobbinsfromsidetoside,hencetheterm.Materials:Cotton,nickle-freemetal.Nrofstrands:Length:

Figure 1: Documentation card for a historicalbookmark.

has not been easy, I now find ConTEXt much moreversatile than anything I’ve had before, doubling asa word processor and tool for desktop publishing.

Thus far I’ve used TEX, mainly ConTEXt, totypeset three kinds of documents: documentationon pieces I’ve created, instructions on how to dosomething, and little odds and ends necessary to mytiny craft business.

Documentation is an integrated part of my craft-ing. I feel that telling the story behind an itemadds to its value. A hobby of mine is historicalre-enactment, and there it is important to “justify”the existence of an item by explaining the historicalcontext, usually with literary and visual references.Even a small item can illustrate history and bring itclose, e.g. a bead-decorated multi-strand bookmarkilluminates an era when page numbers were a rarityand books were stored flat rather than upright.

Instructions are all about sharing the knowledgeone has gained. Instructions on paper can seldomfully replace hands-on training, but I always try toinclude both written instructions and graphics asdifferent people prefer different versions. Nowadays Itry to complement the instruction sheets with onlinevideos, but I’d rather not count on the moving pic-ture; living with slightly dodgy Internet connectionshas taught me to value downloadable instruction files!

The business end of my typesetting is the newestaddition to my TEXing and also the one that saves methe most time: judicious use of layers and impositionsuddenly makes perfect tags and labels much easierto achieve than it ever was with word processors. AsI attend a variety of craft-related events, I used tohave several different price lists, one “medieval”, one“old-fashioned” and one “modern” (with man-madematerials only appearing in the third one). Now I canfairly easily maintain just one price list from which

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286 TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 3

3

La

Lb

Lc

Ld

Ra

Rb

Rc

Rd

Third step: through one and pickup reversed.

Put left index finger La throughthe loop on the left middle fingerLb and hook the lowermost shankon the right from below and pull itthrough to left (pickup reversed).

Tighten the braid by pulling yourhands apart.

La

Lb

Lc

Ld

Ra

Rb

Rc

Rd

Fourth step: shift down.

Shift the loops on the right handdown by one finger to free up theright index finger Ra. Start fromthe beginning.

Figure 2: An instruction page for a broad lace.

I pick whatever is needed for a given event, withoutdealing with (e.g.) tedious mail merge functions.

2 Scrapbooking and cardcraft

My handwriting was never great to start with, andI’m badly out of practice since switching to comput-ers over 20 years ago. Thus, when I have a reason tomake a greeting card, I resort to typesetting every-thing on computer, so I only need to sign the cardafter printing. I’ve managed to create these texts in aword processor or vector drawing program — depend-ing on what was available — but ConTEXt has madethe process much easier to control. This especiallyapplies when the card is of unusual size, e.g. becauseI’ve messed up with a punched border and cut it offto save the rest of the card; changing the ConTEXtcode to reflect this is much faster than fiddling withtext boxes in a word processor file.

Sometimes it can be hard to come up with asuitable picture for a card. I wanted to expressmy condolences and support to a friend whose long-awaited baby was stillborn, but the available cardswere either too somber and dark or otherwise inap-propriate. In the end I resorted to the “poetry for alloccasions” section in my bookshelf, and found a beau-tiful Finnish poem on a child resting on soft greenmoss, gently rocked by the wind, a poem that wasn’ttoo “heavy” to remember this little one. When Ihad found the text, the rest of the card grew out ofit: looking for and finding a (free) rainy background,trimming the text by tearing the edges, applying itwith glue dots on blue card.

Figure 3: An example business order.

Figure 4: Condolences card.

I like using printed texts because I can get a newone if I mess it up in the assembly stage — but thiscard turned out to be one of those rare specimenswhere everything went right on the first go. Asthis was the first time I had tried using backgroundtexture, the learning curve was steep and bumpy asalways, but definitely worth the effort. Not only wasI content with how this card turned out (figure 4), Inow have a template that can be tweaked to becomeany type of card with a background graphic and atext on top of it. Another poem, another background,a different edge treatment, e.g. a lace edge punch,and the card will look totally different with verylittle effort.

Mari Voipio

TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 3 287

ABCD

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Figure 5: Tablet weaving of a heart braid pattern:simulation, threading chart, and turning sequence.

3 Tablet weaving

Tablet weaving or card weaving is an ancient tech-nique for weaving patterned ribbons. It is a compli-cated technique due to the structure of the braid:the most common weaving tablet is a square with ahole for thread at each corner, and each card can bethreaded either from the left or right, although allthreads in a given card need to come from the samedirection. During the weaving process the tablets areturned a quarter round away or toward the weaver toget a new shed (space for the weft), and one can ei-ther turn the whole pack together or split the tabletsand turn them to different directions. All this makesfor a fairly complex structure — and then there areadditional techniques to further manipulate warpand weft threads.

When I originally learned tablet weaving, I wastaught to plan my braids on squared paper. However,I soon found out that it was very easy to forget one ofthe variables, and those mistakes tended to be costly:it could take me three hours to thread a simple warpand start weaving, only to find out that the patternwasn’t at all what I wanted. I’m not the first onewho thought about using computer as shortcut, andfor several years I used open source software thathad its features and limitations, but worked — onlyin Windows. When I changed over to Macs I hadto come up with a different solution. For a whileI used Inkscape to draw pattern simulations, butthe oblique “stitch” turned out to be a bit hard toplace accurately and in general I got tired of all therepetitive clicking and the work involved every timeI wanted to change something. This was enoughincentive to try to implement MetaPost instead.

For the simplest tablet weaving patterns I justmake a simulation graphic for myself and follow itwhen threading the tablets. However, a threadingchart makes the process of creating a warp a bitfaster, especially if thread counts are included. Forpatterns where tablets turn separately, a turning

Figure 6: A page from my Helsinge Book.

chart is also needed. In mine I mark the deviatingtablets with a darker background, as in the heartribbon that was inspired by Valentine’s Day (figure 5).I chose to weave this in evenly and tightly spunpearl cotton to ensure clean lines, but I was stillsurprised by how well it turned out compared withthe simulation.

4 Historical (re)creation

Another of my favorite braiding techniques is finger-loop braiding, where loops of yarn are held on thefingers of both hands (usually not the thumbs) andmanipulated by switching them from finger to fingerthrough or past each other. This technique is sur-prisingly well-documented in 15th and 17th centuryEnglish manuscripts that have been transcribed byseveral researchers. By now I remember the simplestbraiding sequences, but need cheat sheets for themore complicated ones. Because modern books arefrowned on at some of the events I go to, I decided tocreate a Renaissance-style fingerloop braiding “recipebook” to show demonstration spectators and to jogmy memory.

Thus, my “Helsinge Book of Braids and Laces”(named in period style after the place where it wascreated) is typeset in ConTEXt with the Lucida Open-Type calligraphy and blackletter fonts, and printedon sturdy off-white parchment paper (figure 6). Sam-ple braids are attached with a few sewing stitchesthrough the paper. I chose this approach for tworeasons: I wanted to make the book easy and cheap

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288 TUGboat, Volume 33 (2012), No. 3

to replace if it gets rained on (for example); andI wanted to be able to add new braiding recipesanywhere in the book so I can keep related braidstogether instead of having to add them to the endof the book in the order I find or create them. Cur-rently there are only six A5 pages of recipes in myprinted copy and many samples are missing, but theproject is constantly growing, spurred by the positiveinterest that my little booklet has received whereverI’ve shown it.

5 Other ideas

One idea leads to another, and the possibilities seemendless. In tablet weaving I need charts for double-faced weave and brocade, and a lot of automationto omit the most tedious stages of pattern planning.I could also use weaving drafts and especially simu-lation graphics for rigid heddle, inkle and backstrapweaving and even my small “real” weaving loom. Iam also learning Japanese braiding techniques andrecently found a book with beautiful patterns, butinstruction charts that just don’t parse for me, so Ihave to rework them using a system I can understand.

In other textile crafts I’m itching to try my handat quilting, as MetaPost will be handy in playingwith shapes and color. I should also be able to createcutting plans and even cutting patterns for manymedieval and Renaissance items of clothing, anothertask I’m used to doing on gridded paper. As there areseveral common fabric widths and shrinkage dependson the fiber, the preliminary cutting plans oftenhave to be remade after the fabric is purchased andwashed; this should be at least less smudgy withMetaPost, if not less work.

I also want to learn to create interactive PDFsfrom my instruction sheets. When I’ve gotten morepractice in integrating MetaPost in ConTEXt docu-ments, I hope to be able to add all types of fancyframes around my texts and pictures as well. Thecombination of MetaPost and ConTEXt also allowsfor fitting text into shapes and clipping text andgraphics to shapes.

Besides paper and fibre, I also play with beads.When I string a necklace, it typically has a patternwhere two colors and/or shapes and/or sizes of beadsare combined. I think this could be simulated to someextent by placing objects on an oval path of appro-priate diameter or length. There are so many factorsto be taken into account that MetaPost will neverbe able to substitute a real tactile beading boardand a real strung necklace, but a quick simulationshould show whether something will be pleasing tomy eye and if so, what amounts of, say, 6 mm and

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10ABCD

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10ABCD

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10ABCD

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Figure 7: Testing a design theme and variations.

4 mm beads I need for the project. Again, playingwith color is faster virtually; in real life, it takes awhile to pick out all 50 red beads and put 50 bluein the vacated slots, while on the computer it is amatter of a quick round of find and replace — orreplace all, if one is feeling courageous.

6 Why TEX and friends?

Recently my games with MetaPost and (Con)TEX(t)have attracted quite a bit of curiosity both withinthe ConTEXt community and among the braiders, soI often have to explain why I’ve made this choice.The main aim of the whole exercise is to shorten orentirely avoid the most repetitive and tedious stagesof crafting to free up time and energy for creativity.If changing a color scheme on a braid takes threeminutes instead of 30, I can try out a lot more colorschemes in the same amount of time. When I gointo that mode, I don’t want technical issues to holdup the flow of new ideas. (See a design theme andvariations in figure 7.)

I’m sure there is existing commercial or opensource software for everything I use, and usuallylearning to use just that software would be fasterand easier. The flip side of the coin is that dedi-cated software is (at best) good at doing what itwas intended to do, but it can often be expensive,or restricted to just one operating system, or goodat the basics but hopeless at an advanced level. AsI’m interested in a wide variety of crafts, I needsomething that is as versatile as possible and theConTEXt suite in combination with MetaPost andTEX/ConTEXt code ticks all the boxes for me. I hopeto write more articles in the future going into moreof the TEXnical and MetaPost-ish details.

� Mari Voipiomari dot voipio (at) lucet dot

fi

http://www.lucet.fi

Mari Voipio