News
5/6/08 - Knitter 0.2.1 Bugfix Release
A bugfix release is out. This came out so quickly because there were some pretty big bugs on OSX. In particular, the error message dialog was causing the program to crash, which means that every time there was an error, even if it was handled internally, the entire program crashed. This was also occuring on any system with a Unicode build, so several varieties of Unix were also affected. If you were experiencing lots of crashes with older releases, please try the new one! Also changing the gravity field under the Simulation tab actually changes the model's gravity, and a few memory leaks have been plugged.
I wanted to note that if anybody is having trouble with stability, Knitter now produces a logfile called knitter.log in its working directory. It should contain some pretty detailed information about anything that's gone wrong, and it could help explain why Knitter isn't working the way you expect. If you encounter any problems, please make a bug report on Sourceforge, and include this file if it's at all possible, along with information about what OS you're using.
5/5/08 - Knitter 0.2.0 Released
The latest Knitter release is available on the project page. This release adds support for OSX and removed the dependency on GTK. Stability has also been improved with this release with several crashes due to error checking failures fixed. I've also added some up-to-date screenshots to the Screenshots page. Go check it out!
Introduction
Knitter is a program for producing and visualizing three-dimensional models of knitting patterns. It uses wxWidgets for a GUI and has been tested on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. It should run on any platform that has a wxWidgets port.
The program takes in a knitting pattern (expressed very similarly to traditional patterns, but without ambiguities) and produces a three-dimensional model. You can't tell from the screenshots below, but you can actually rotate that model around and zoom in and out using the mouse. Also, those little red spheres are stitches. The red lines going between stitches represent yarn, or at least "connectedness" of stitches. For lines going left and right, the lines would actually be yarn connecting the previous and next stitches. Lines up and down represent loops in the yarn that connect stitches in different rows. We aren't actually drawing the stitches quite yet (we will in a future version), but this lattice structure should accurately represent the structure of a real project using the same instructions.
One of the goals of this project is to support KnitML as an upcoming standard for exchanging knitting patterns. The current version of Knitter does not support all aspects of KnitML, but it is capable of basic functionality, with support for more complex contructs coming later.
The official SF page is here. It will probably be more up-to-date than this site, so check the official SF downloads for the most up-to-date release.
A Quick Example
The native language for Knitter is closer to a typical knitting pattern. For example, a swatch that's 10 stitches wide and 10 rows tall would look something like:
# Simple 10x10 swatch
sk co 9 turn # make a loop, cast on 9, turn fabric
{ k 10 turn } 9
Notice the braces instead of the * typically used. The reason I used the braces was so that repeated blocks could be nested. Note that if you ran this pattern as is, the stitches would fall off the screen immediately due to gravity. You'll need to fix some of the stitches in space for them to stick around.
# Simple 10x10 swatch, fixed in space
sk fix(-4,0,0) co 9 fix(4,0,0) turn
{ k 10 turn } 9
Here the first slipknot has been fixed in space a little to the left, and the last stitch on the first row has been fixed a little to the right. When the simulation is run, the fabric will be generated and will flop down and be anchored at these two points, as if you were holding them there. See the documentation for more specifics on the language.