Font Studio — Build your own stitch fonts

What is the Font Studio?

The place where a font is drawn: a design of its own kind, with one character of the set at a time on the canvas. Every letter is drawn once, at one design height, with the same tools as any design — satin columns, running stitch, fills, nodes, the Pencil. The app checks each letter at every size the font promises and tells you, per size, whether it holds. Saved, the font appears in the Text tool under Own, types like any shipped font and scales to any size inside its promised range.

Start one from the gallery: New → New font…. Give it a name, choose what the letters are made of (satin columns, a single line, or filled shapes), pick a character set and the sizes the font should sew cleanly at — up to five. All of this can be changed later from the slider icon in the character bar.

How do I draw a letter?

The canvas shows the working area of the character in the bar at the bottom: dashed lines for baseline, x-height, cap height, ascender and descender, a green line where the letter begins and a red one where the next letter will begin. Draw inside it as you would draw anything. Whatever you draw belongs to the character on the canvas; tap another character in the bar to move on — the drawing stays with its letter.

Lay a typeface underneath to trace: the template button at the left of the bar takes any font on the iPad or a font file of your own, shown faintly at the design height. For filled fonts, the template can also suggest a first version of every empty character. Satin columns and single lines are drawn by hand — a column placed by hand follows the stroke the way a suggestion never does. For cutting and comparing, Above the stitches lays the template over the drawing with its outline.

What is the advance?

Where the next letter begins — the red line. It differs from letter to letter: an i is narrow, an M wide. Drag the red triangle below the working area to set it, in every tool but Arrange; it snaps to the right edge of the drawing plus a side bearing. With a template set, every undrawn character already carries the typeface’s advance. In the inspector of the letter’s group, Advance from the ink sets it from the drawing.

How do the sizes work?

The row under the character bar lists the sizes of the set. Every letter is drawn once; the app scales it to each size and runs the same check the shipped fonts pass — column width, stitch length, hooks, openings, ends at a join. A green dot holds, an amber one has a finding; tap a size and a card on the canvas names it. The dot in the character bar reads the same way: grey is still empty, purple a suggestion from the template, blue drawn and not yet checked, green holds at every size of the set, amber has a finding.

When a letter fails at a small size, there are two ways. Let the size go: the saved font then promises only the range in which every letter holds, and the Text tool offers it only there. Or draw an own version for that size: the inspector’s Own version for 8 mm makes a copy of the letter to redraw for that size alone — a sturdier stem, a wider opening — still on the same canvas at the design height. It holds from its size up to just below the next size of the set. The grid icon at the end of the row opens the board of all characters against all sizes; every cell names its finding, and Needs work hides the letters that already hold. Tap a cell and the canvas shows that letter at that size, with a card that says what was found and what helps, and amber rings at the places.

How does the font leave the app?

Save font in the toolbar puts the font into your library; every save is the next revision of the same font, and designs made with an earlier revision keep working. For giving it away, open Export — exporting the .hoopfont saves the font first. A font in the Font Studio offers its own export files:

• .hoopfont — the font as one file. On any iPad with StitchPencil, opening it installs the font; the Text tool’s Own tab imports it too, and so does the gallery’s Import. The Own tab’s Share font… sends a saved font the same way.
• Letters as stitch files (.zip) — one machine file per drawn letter, for machines and other programs: tick the sizes of the set and the formats you want, filed in folders like 8mm/pes/ when there is more than one. The sheet says how many files that will be, and the queue shows the progress. The ZIP also carries a small file with the font’s metrics, so imported under Own it comes back with every letter on its baseline and spaced as drawn. File names are plain ASCII and spell the case out (Oswald_A_upper.pes, Oswald_a_lower.pes): on Windows and most USB sticks, A.pes and a.pes are the same file.
• Font specimen (.pdf) — one cell per drawn character: a picture of it sewn at the middle size of the set, and its stitch count at every size underneath.
• Project file (.hoop) — the working file itself, to continue on another iPad.

Before the .hoopfont, the letter ZIP and the specimen, the app checks every letter at every size of the set, so the font promises only sizes that hold. Letters checked before and unchanged since are not checked again, not even after a restart. Check letters at every size in the export switches this off: the font then offers its whole size set unchecked. The check never stops an export, and Cancel ends one at any time.

All of them go through the Export Unlock like every other way out. A font you received from someone else types and sews without it — only building and giving away are export.