Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:07] Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 777 for November 2nd, 2023, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. One of the great joys of Mastodon is that I'm meeting new people with a cross-section of interests that overlap with my own by following hashtags like programming, technology, knitting, and crocheting. And it turns out I can find fellow nerds who are also into some of the crafts I enjoy. I discovered today's guest, Angela Preston, also known as AngelaPreston at toot.site, through these hashtags.
Turns out she's a knitter and she created a website by hand, and the website explains how she built a font for knitting using an open source font creation tool. Now, this is such a crazy crossover of crafts and tech, and I'm just super excited to welcome to the show Angela Preston.
How are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me, Allison.
[1:05] So, this is definitely going to be a weird show. As I was saying to Angela ahead of time, how many people on earth will ever have this conversation?
But then it makes me wonder, are there like three people on earth who want to listen to this conversation? But we don't care because we love the subject, right?
Right. Yeah. All right. So, before we dig into the tech of what you've done and even talking about why anybody would care about knitting in this context and tech, just a little bit about yourself.
Well, how did you get into coding this website and what's your background?
Well, I learned to knit around the end of 2005. So that's how long I've been a knitter.
And it was around, I would say 2008, 2009 that I really fell in love with cabled knitting patterns.
Those really beautiful kind of Celtic knot looking fishermen's sweaters.
Might have even seen some of the Viking patterns for knitting by Elisabeth Lovell that are just gorgeous and I wanted to make those and I found that reading those patterns was a little bit tricky for me and I discovered that there is a way to chart them in a grid that made me very excited about learning a new way of getting into the knitting patterns and.
[2:24] I wanted to create a way for myself to make that easier. So a lot of people listening will only be into tech.
They're maybe not even sure which one is knitting.
So let's talk about what a regular knitting pattern looks like.
A regular knitting pattern is written in a very specific type of language, just like when you're programming a computer. And a lot of it will boil down to basically ones and zeros, right?
You have knits and you have purls. And what a purl is, is the opposite of a knit.
So if you're looking at the front of a sweater where it's all smooth and it's got lots of little V's on it You turn it around and it's all nubbly on the back. Those are the pearls And so if you're knitting something you need both of those, Because if you're knitting one direction and you get all the V's and you knit back the other way from the back of the fabric You're gonna want to purl on that side so that all the V's are on the same side when you're finished.
[3:21] That's a really good way to describe it, even if you're wearing a t-shirt, even.
Take out a t-shirt and kind of stretch the fabric. When you look on the front side, it's got the little, they're little tiny ones, but they're little tiny Vs. And the other side is the nubbly side.
That's right. And by the way, knitting is the one with two big, two needles that maybe, maybe stuck together, but not the one with the hook. That's crocheting. Needles are knitting.
[3:43] Yeah. And so, with knitting, it's made up of a combination of knits and purls.
There are other things you can do, but that's what it basically boils down to, so it is kind of binary when you think about it.
And when you write a traditional knitting pattern, you read it like you would read anything else.
You read it from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, from the left side of the page to the right side of the page, and it's all abbreviated, right?
You have a lot of K2, P1, for knit two, purl one, and it's just all of those abbreviations in a row with a bunch of numbers.
Sometimes they're contained in brackets, which tells you that this is a section you need to repeat, and it tells you how many times to repeat that particular section.
It's kind of a dumb kind of code. Yeah, I think of that as a subroutine, right?
Right, yeah. It's a little subroutine, so you can loop back through it.
But if you're lucky, you get brackets around it. A lot of times they don't, and they just put a little asterisk, and then they say repeat from star six times.
So now you're going back and how are you gonna designate how many times you've gone through?
Well, you're gonna need to get a pencil out and mark your pattern with a little hash mark.
Okay, did it once, did it twice. And now you end up backing up and you're like, oh shoot, did I back up three of them, two of them? Was I halfway through one of those? It's a nightmare.
[5:01] It is. And I find or found that, and still more as I age, that it's a lot more difficult for me to keep track all those little K's and P's on the page and I discovered that There was a better way for me a more visual way so i guess that would be like instead of programming with old machine language you're learning a different programming language that makes things more simple there you go these are diagrams that are basically a grid of marks And instead of having to keep track and repeat, you'll just see I'm on this one, this one, this one, this one, this one going across.
[5:41] Yes, exactly. So each square in the grid represents a stitch and it tells you what to do when you get to that stitch.
It could be a knit, it could be a purl, it could be a combination of stitches where you have to cross perhaps three knitted stitches over three other knitted stitches.
That's how you get that beautiful knotwork over a background of purled fabric.
And what I liked about learning the symbols for knitting was it was much more visual for me, much easier to keep track of where I was, much easier to see where I was in the pattern because you could look at the page and see the representation of the knotwork that you were working on.
Depending on the font that it was composed in, it was sometimes easier, sometimes maybe a little harder to get a grasp for what the finished product would look like.
And that was part of my inspiration was I really loved the knitting fonts that made it easy to see.
[6:41] On the paper what your finished product was going to look like because that helped me stay oriented.
Would it also be true that by creating your own font you could make the font size as big as you want? Yes. So... Well within the limits of a piece of paper and the width of the pattern that you're working on, I suppose.
[7:00] Part of the reason I wanted to make my own was because at the time I fell in love with cabled patterns and the idea of knitting from a chart.
There were about three free knitting fonts available.
This was back in 2008, 2009, and none of them were exactly what I was looking for.
And I was thrifty enough that I wasn't crazy about buying a whole knitting font, which In retrospect, seems a little funny to me, but I thought...
I'll go spend 200 hours doing this instead, but that was more fun.
I don't think I knew how much time it was going to take. But I realized that there would be a way for me to do my own.
And I thought of several different approaches. I was thinking maybe I would do the font where you can do your own handwriting.
And then you send it in, they scan it for you, they create a font from it.
And that's the product that you end up with.
I thought I could draw symbols. I could get out some engineering paper and, you know, go to town.
But then I found out about Fontstruct and the idea that I could create each of my symbols from the ground up was so attractive and it was free.
They just let you go design a font. And I thought, well.
[8:14] That doesn't sound too hard. Good, good. Let me stop you there real quick before we get into font struct because that is really kind of the meat of what's awesome here.
But what are these diagrams, charts, fonts, what do they look like? Like what does a knit look like? Is it a little V and the pearl is a little bubble thing?
Well, that's really dependent on the person who creates the font. I've seen lots of different varieties, actually.
There are certain similarities that you'll see.
Some people will use just an open blank box to represent knits, and they'll use a box with a dot in it to represent pearls.
Some people will use a box with an upright line to indicate a knit, and they'll use a horizontal line to indicate a pearl.
So there are a lot of different flavors.
Every time you get a new pattern, you have to train your brain to what does that mean?
[9:10] Yeah, yeah, and that's another thing that was kind of getting in my way.
They all contain a key, which is very handy. So you just print the key and have it handy for when you get to that symbol so you can remember what it is they want you to do. But you're right, it's like different dialects. And yeah, it does get a little. Yeah, there. I mean, I would say that they're all related in the way that romance languages are related. But just because you speak Spanish doesn't mean you're going to be fluent in French.
I knew a woman who was a friend of mine in college was taking Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish back to back to back, like eight to nine, one language, nine to ten, ten to eleven. She couldn't speak any of them by the end of the day.
Just all scrambled up. Yeah, I don't know. I Really admire people who can be in the polyglot and speak several different languages I'm I'm doing good just to master the one I took German for a while and enjoyed that It's you know, you speak it also. So there that's two I.
[10:18] What about programming languages do you are you a programmer Well, I was a software tester for a while. What I did mainly was black box testing, the user acceptance testing. So mimicking what a user would do more than doing any coding. I've done some light coding here and there. Like you mentioned, I put together the website. So I've done, you know, some light HTML, I've done a little bit of CSS. I've done Visual Basic. I really like to get into Excel and make my own macros. I like to make things faster. So a little bit of that.
That. Okay, okay. So we now know the problem to be solved is you're trying to make your own diagrams. You're going to be translating, so you're not inventing the pattern, but taking a pattern and translating it from this Cyrillic that you're trying to read into something that makes sense to you. So now you've got to decide what you want each type of stitch to look like and create that key and create this font. And what was the name of the website you found again to create the font? I went to Fontstruct.
[11:26] Now, Fontstruct, the way I like to describe it is so open sourcey. I mean, it's got everything you love about open source, you know, it's got that Soviet era UI, you know, that you would expect.
Yeah, and I hadn't been out there for some time until you had asked me about the font. And so I So I went back out, and it's a little different now than it was when I originally went there, but it's not as much different as I thought it might be.
So, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
And what I loved about it was also the thing that got a little bit tricky.
[12:06] It's really open you can do almost anything you want as long as you use their little pre-programmed pixels so you're building your font basically pixel by pixel or little tiny shape by little tiny shape and i had to figure out the best way to draw a diagonal line the best way to make a circle the best way you know how how why did i want these to be because.
I knew immediately that I wanted it to be a fixed width font so that it built its own grid with each character being exactly as wide as every other character.
[12:41] And then the first time I tried it out, I realized that my edges were too thick and my grid didn't look right.
And I needed to make the edges half as wide so that each character next to each other created one whole line between them.
Like that were kind of a learning curve for me in constructing the font. But yes, picking my favorite version of each symbol, determining which symbols I could include and which ones I was going to have to leave out because there are so many. If you are mainly a lace knitter, the symbols on the charts that you're used to may be very different from the ones that you see mostly as a cable knitter. And I tried to do my best to be inclusive and use all of the characters on the keyboard and the little alt plus numbers to get some of those alternate characters in there. But I'm sure there are still some that I didn't get to.
You were just making a font for you. You were making a font for all of us.
Well, yeah. So I thought one of the things that I thought would get in my way if I was a designer, And I'm not a knitting designer, but I see a lot of really nice patterns.
[13:52] It seemed like a lot of them had gone the route of the engineering paper and drawing their own chart and then scanning it in.
And that was part of their their finished pattern.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But it seemed like a lot of work and it wasn't very standard.
And like you said, every time I opened a new pattern, I had to learn how they had constructed their own font or how they wrote it out.
[14:18] So I thought, there's only three knitting fonts that are available for free.
What if I did this one? They're letting me create it on fontstruct for free.
What if I just release it into the wild for free and tell people that they can use it in the patterns they make as long as those patterns aren't necessarily for profit.
[14:39] Because there are a lot of really great free knitting patterns out there. And if I could help those designers customers give their users or their customers a little bit better experience.
That was something that I thought would be really cool. I mean, it's kind of what we wanted to do.
The work you were doing, you were going to give away for free.
And that meant that you wanted the people who used it to give their work away for free.
So it's the chain of happiness.
Yes. And so that's why I put it under Creative Commons license.
I did make exceptions to it.
If you are going to sell your pattern one time, like to Knitty, and then Knitty provides it to free for all of their users, that's still within the realm of what I'm trying to get at is patterns that are available for free.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's interesting.
So one thing I didn't take into account or even think about when you described this, you've got some examples on your website that show the, you know, you've got dots and diagonals and such, and I didn't think about what if the shape was not a dot or a diagonal?
What would you have to do?
And when I started playing around with font struct, I realized, well, there's like a little curve that's concave in the upper left, or it's concave in the upper right, or it's convex in the upper left and the upper right, and that's going to make a smoother shape on an end, for example, when you're trying to build a font.
If you got into a lot of the different symbols, that's crazy.
[16:06] That's crazy, I mean, that's going to be a lot of work to make all those.
[16:11] It was a labor of love. I was so excited about it.
I tend to hyper focus on new things that I get interested in and I found that parking myself in front of the TV on the coffee table working on my font every night was a really good way to kind of blow off the stress of the workday, completely change gears mentally, into something creative, something I was really excited about.
And it was, I mean, I had some setbacks. I had some things that I had to go back and redo, which is never my favorite, but it was the immediate gratification. You know, how.
[16:49] When you're mowing the lawn, you immediately see what you did. It's satisfying. You can see, what you've accomplished right away. Real big fan of instant gratification. And that was something I could see with my font. I could see the symbols I'd already created. I could see how they work together because I could download it even when I wasn't completely finished with it and keep test driving it as I went. And looking at other patterns and maybe changing changing the way that I thought these needed to mix together. I really struggled with some of the cable symbols. I mean, the whole reason I wanted to do it was to write these cable patterns in a way that I could read them more easily. But when you're talking about taking, you know, three stitches and crossing them over three other stitches, how do you design three characters, or, you know, two characters that will mesh with each other, what will play well, to finalize that kind of recipe for the crossing of those two cables. And I really struggled with.
[17:54] Getting the angle right for those crossings, making sure that it made sense in the context of a whole grid full of these symbols. But eventually I got something I was happy with.
So are you inventing that symbology? Like you had to think it up or were you mimicking stuff other people had done or starting with that as a template and then making it your own? A lot of it is derivative. I mean like I said there's different kind of dialects but there's also a whole lot of similarities. There are a lot of crossings real c2 diagonal lines going one way with kind of two lines behind them going the other way and that will indicate a cable crossing so that sort of thing is very common or like a dot for a pearl or a line for a minute.
I'm the description for people listening who don't know anything about knitting when i think of cabling cable stitching as being like a freeway interchange.
Yeah you try to say what does that look like and if you're lucky it's just to.
[18:53] Some of them get very exciting. I I read an article so long ago about Unventing a cable and I think it was by interweave and they they said you could take a picture of a cabled pattern And then you could kind of draw each cable in its own color and make sure that you didn't cross the color So you had to have one color go over the other color and then by the time you were done each Each cable had its own color, and that told you where it wove through the pattern, and you could keep track of it that way.
And then you could write your own chart based on how those colors meandered over your grid.
It was really fascinating.
[19:33] I didn't go the color route with my font, but... It's just a different road to madness.
Yes. Well, but it helped me think of it. It helped me to frame it in my mind, how I could put these crossings together.
I never thought of the freeway thing, though. That's really good, because that is exactly what it's like.
Yeah. As you were describing it, you were holding your hands up, and I could see what you were doing. Yeah. I talk with my hands a lot. No, no. That's probably not going to come across well, but...
I'll translate. Thanks.
So, what does, how does font struct work? What is it?
Because what you're telling us could apply to not knitting, right?
It could apply to any kind of font on a crate. Oh, yes. And there are some really great fonts on Fontstruct.
When I was in it all the time. Oh, you can get them from there, too. Yeah.
You can just go out there and find what other people have created and download it for yourself.
There were some really neat, I think I found one that was kind of a Klingon font, one that was kind of like a mimic of the Star Trek font.
Some really elaborate ones, really graceful ones.
Um, the hardest part of my font was actually creating the numbers.
Because when you make a charted knitting pattern, you generally put the number next to the row and you have to invent every character in your font.
[20:59] So I had to create Arabic numerals to go with my font. And that was a lot harder than putting in, you know, V's and little circles and lines.
Well, so could you use the font, the numbers from somebody else's font?
[21:17] I think that.
I could have used them, but I couldn't import them into the font that I was producing, as far as I know.
Oh, so these are open source to download, but not to modify.
And then change midstream and be like, you know, I'm going to use six from this guy.
Oh, I see. Okay.
But boy, free fonts, these are cool. I don't know, maybe you can now.
I don't think I could then, but that's something maybe I should check into.
There are some beautiful fonts here, some crazy ones. I don't even know what that one says.
I mean, people love it so much that they go out and they spend all that time creating these beautiful fonts.
[21:56] I thought there were a fair amount on this page, but I looked and it didn't look like that many and it said page one, two, three down at the bottom, but then it said last and when I hit last, it was 146 pages of free fonts.
Yeah, and some of them are very similar. I mean, I made two.
I made one with my knitting symbols that don't have borders around them and one that does have a border.
So one set has a box around every symbol and if you type with those it builds its own grid.
But for some people maybe they already have a grid. Maybe they're putting it into a spreadsheet or some other knitting program that they're using and they would like a font that doesn't have the box because it gets in their way.
So I did both of those and it was really easy to just use the same font and take off the boxes that I had added.
[22:48] Oh, okay. Okay. So the boxes are actually part of the font. Yeah.
On one of my fonts. Hopefully you could replicate that.
It's like serif sans serif, right? One has boxes, one doesn't.
Well, please tell me there's no sans serif or serif on the knitting symbols, right?
No, I did not go that far. are supposed to lead your eye to the next one, and in this case that wouldn't really make sense.
Okay, okay. So you've built your website, and I do still want to get into why you did it the way you did it and where you did it, but I want to ask a question about the fonts themselves.
When you download the font, you get a whole lot of files.
[23:28] Yes, I wanted to try and make it really user friendly and that might go back to being a software tester That was the job I had when I was building the font, One of the things I had to do in my in my role at work was help the users understand, What was changing with the release that I was testing? I had to provide, you know notes for them, Maybe some helpful hints about how things would be different and how they could you know, use this to their best advantage. And I wanted to do the same thing with the fonts that I was creating because it's one thing to go and install a font on your computer. It's another thing to go in and use it. And the disadvantage with this font was that on a normal keyboard, the keys tell you this is A, this is B, this is C, this is QWERTY or Dvorak, whichever you use. And, oh my gosh, I just realized maybe I need to make another map for Dvorak.
[24:28] This one, without a map to interpret where the symbols are, it's very difficult to find what you're looking for. I tried to map it in a way that made sense to me. So symbols that I use commonly are on kind of home row or close to it. And sometimes I try to map cable symbols, to keys that mimicked them, like the.
[24:54] The brackets are kind of the beginning and the ending of the cable symbol recipes.
So I made keyboard maps to show people where the symbols were located.
And then I also provided a sheet that showed kind of some common combinations that I was going to use when charting cable patterns to show what the symbols look like all in a row.
And then gave kind of the recipe for creating that same symbol combination.
So that people would know how they could mimic it in their pattern.
Let me make sure I understand which one of these you're talking about.
So one of the files is suggested uses. It's a PDF. Is that the one you're talking about?
Yeah. Or are you talking about additional symbols? Because that one's...
Suggested uses. Additional symbols is really for the things that aren't commonly used by me.
So they got put other places.
Okay, we'll come back to that one. But so suggested uses, You show I would suggest using the letter h which makes an empty square box, which means knit, G is a dot that one's going to be pearl and then it gets scary after that.
[26:01] Interesting, I think it's interesting interesting. There we go. Um so that's Kind of so you're just suggesting people don't need to, Use the symbols you've created to mean the things you've meet you've created. They really don't do a different dialect with this they could, I think it might be hard with the options I gave for them to get to bar, but they definitely could, there's a lot of a lot of options and it's not really, set in stone how to use it. Okay.
[26:35] Now, one thing we should mention here, we discovered through our budding friendship that Angela is a PC user and that I'm a Mac user.
And the way I figured this out was she had a page on her website that said it was a Q&A or an FAQ thing and it said, does it work on the Mac?
And she said, I don't think it does. I've been told that it doesn't.
But this was quite a while ago, and I figured out how to install the font and make it work quite easily. It doesn't actually show up automatically. Like, if you drag the font into FontBook and then you just go into Word or Pages, which would be more reasonable, or TextEdit, it won't be in the drop-down. It just doesn't exist. So you would think, oh, it doesn't exist. But if you bring up the font viewer, the little, I don't know what it's called, if you hit Command-T in just about any program, it brings up this this little floating palette for fonts.
You can select it there, and as soon as you select it once, it exists everywhere.
It exists back in the regular program. So it's just a little tweak that you have to do to get it to work.
There might be an easier way to do it, but that's how I got it to work.
So I'm gonna help her rewrite that section to say, well, yes, it does, and here's a fellow nerd to explain it to you.
And I'm so excited about that. I cannot tell you, because that's probably the question I've gotten the most that I could not answer.
[27:51] Because I was pretty sure that Fontstruct said that it should work on a Mac, but as a non-Mac user, I didn't have a solution.
So- There's probably a nerd listening who will tell me why it is it's not immediately recognized, that it's probably some sort of blessing thing that needs to be in the file, but this is a quick workaround to get it done until somebody tells us how to make it work more automatically.
So- And if somebody does tell you that, I'd love to know.
Oh yeah, nope, I'm not gonna tell you. I'm gonna charge you for it.
By the way, the podcast is Creative Commons open source as well, just so you know. Awesome.
So you got this additional symbols thing and this is where can i fold into being a pc is you got some symbols like you got one it says pearl through back loop and but to the left of it it's got words that i only see in pc land alt which i know it's like option but then it says 0192.
Yeah what is your what is your 192.
[28:48] The.
The letter that comes right before alt is kind of optional letters that other languages use more commonly than we do in English, right?
So you have an A with an accent over it, or an A with a circle over it, or an A and E combination.
To easily get those on a PC, well, I don't know if this is the easiest way, I guess I'd say what you said, there's probably someone who knows better than I do, but this is how I do it.
It. If I want to insert one of those when I'm typing using a regular like Times New Roman font, I would hold down my ALT key. And while I'm holding it down, I would type, you know, 0192.
[29:35] And then when I'm done, it will pull in that letter. So I mapped those extra symbols that I created that I didn't have room for on the keyboard to those alternate letters.
That's the best way that I know to get them.
While you're typing in line. You can also go into character map and copy it and paste it from there.
That's the way some people do it. But that's a special way that you get those on Mac. I can add that to my additional symbols as well and make it even more accessible.
[30:16] Well, I've just done an article this week on launching something called the keyboard viewer on the Mac, which is also known as the accessibility keyboard, and it just gives you a little on-screen keyboard then you can hold down the different keys to see where they've hidden the funny symbols. And it turns out Option Shift Y is a capital A with an accented U, which is the one that's up and to the right. So I tested it out, I opened up TextEdit, I switched to Kari Nitz, which is the name of her font, and I held down Option Shift Y, and I got the little double, I don't know what you call those, like half an infinity signed up right with dots under them.
Anyway, I got the right symbol. So there is a way to do it on the Mac too.
[30:59] Wonderful. I am learning a ton. This is my favorite. This would be fun.
Yeah, I think I could figure all of these out for you.
So we could have a column for the Mac version and the PC version.
You're pulling me into your madness, Angela.
Well, but you said you knit. So aren't you already there?
And I've also made my own font, but I did it by hand. So I created a handwriting font, where I just, I can now type out a letter and I can make it look like I wrote it by hand.
Nice. Yeah, that one's kind of fun. So I do want to get back to how you created the website.
So it's a Google site, and I didn't know Google still let you make websites.
So they had an original version that does not work anymore. And I used that to start with.
[31:49] I did it because it was free, because I already used Google, and it was fairly easy to do.
It let me do what I wanted to. I wanted to have a site where people could go and download the files.
I thought about trying to put it on Ravelry, which is a really popular knitting, crocheting, But they don't consider a font, a pattern.
And so that's not something that you can put on their site as a downloadable pattern.
I wanted to make it available and I wanted people to just go out and be able to self-serve without going all the way to fontstruct and looking it up.
And so I went out and created a Google site and put both versions of the font and a little bit of explanation, like that FAQ that you saw.
FAQ that you saw.
[32:42] I think that there had been people from all over the world visited that from the analytics that Google sent me. I was getting light ups from countries in Europe. I was getting some from South America. I had somebody from Japan who wanted it.
[32:57] And it was just really gratifying to see how many people at least took a look.
And I got some really good feedback mostly through the email that I set up for the font and also through Ravelry, because I put it out as a project, even though it can't be a pattern, I did put it out as a project so people could see it and then they could find out how to get it.
And I got a lot of really cool ideas.
That's when I decided to do a German keyboard map to make it easier for people, German keyboards.
Somebody asked for it and it was not hard to do.
And I got some feedback on, originally when I released it, some of my cable recipes were wrong.
And somebody told me they test driven it and they pointed it out.
So I had to fix that.
I had some people on Ravelry help me with it too. Oh, go ahead.
Easier that is to fix if you've just typed it in symbols, right?
So you've posted patterns that you've created with this as well?
Well, I didn't.
I'm not a knitting designer, but I put the font itself as its own project, which Ravelry doesn't seem to have a problem with, as long as I don't try and post it as a pattern, and I post it as a project that I did.
[34:17] But that's what somebody found mistakes in? Well, they went out and downloaded the font and the accompanying documentation.
And they said, hey, I tried this and you said it was this and it's not.
Oh, you just had mixed up or something? I had a typo.
So which was, you know, a little bit embarrassing, but I was glad they said something so I could make it better.
I did have some people... Yeah, did they find it early?
[34:46] I hope not. Not like three years later? No. I had some people on Ravelry who are credited in the font.
They helped me test drive it.
Some people who were on the cable knitters group who were interested in it, and I really appreciated them because they caught a lot of things too.
I mean, as a software tester, that was my bread and butter at the time.
Have somebody else take a look at it, you know?
And they did a great job. Isn't it funny how you can't check your own stuff?
I mean, you can, but up to a limit, and then you just can't see it anymore.
That's exactly right.
It stops looking like anything different. I mean, sometimes, even today, all of a sudden, this word doesn't look like a word anymore.
So same thing with the font.
I can see a typo in type text across a table upside down facing the other person, but I can read my own stuff and nope, it's perfect.
And I think I have always thought it was like an arrogance bit in me that I was like, my stuff can't be wrong, but it's all it's like it's invisible to me, but I can see it in anything anybody else, right?
[35:47] Yeah, I have the same. I don't know if we want to call it a gift or a problem Yeah But yeah, there's I mean there's things you can do with regular writing you can have your computer read it to you You can put it in a different font and sometimes that will alert you to Weird errors that you couldn't see originally because you were so used to it. You were skipping over it. But with this.
[36:11] I didn't really have a way to do that right yeah it's not really hard i'm a wordpress conversation or talk once where somebody said.
I wasn't wordpress it doesn't matter it was a programming thing and one of the things they said when you're trying to find a find bugs change the font size.
Because it makes it word wrap differently and all of a sudden your brain sees different characters above and below each other and your brain can see things that it couldn't see before. I thought that was a really strange way to do it.
That's a good tip though. And one thing I noticed on this is when I'm typing up a chart for myself, because I do that all the time, whenever I get a new cable pattern, I rechart it myself in this font because I'm very used to it and so it's easier for me to read it.
I always have to remember not to let Word spell check it because Word doesn't know I'm typing and knitting.
Word thinks I might be trying to type words and it's really concerned that I'm not well.
I have to remember to turn off the spell check.
[37:18] So what app do you type in on your PC? I use Word a lot for this.
I thought when I created it that I would be doing it in Excel, making my own grid and typing in the grid, but I found out that I really prefer to type in Word because the way that I built it, it builds its own grid and you don't have to worry about it.
Why bother with that? Yeah, because you probably spend a whole bunch of time changing the size of the little squares and all that.
This reminds me of when my son was little, I wanted to make him a pillow.
I do cross-stitch, too, and I wanted to do Rugrats.
[37:56] Yeah, it was Rugrats. And there weren't any patterns with Rugrats. They didn't exist.
So I went out and I took pictures from the internet. This is 30 years ago.
I got pictures, could have been on the internet. Anyway, I found pictures somewhere, and I put the pictures in Excel underneath the grid, and then changed the grid to the size that would be whatever it is, 12 or 14 stitches per inch, and then went through and picked out colors that matched with all the different colors of it and built my own pattern.
But with this, I could have used your font.
Ah.
That's amazing. Could you make me a cross stitch font now? Ha ha ha.
You know, I've seen those.
I don't know if anyone's got one for free. I mean, the ones I've used most have color, but a lot of them do have symbols that take up each little square, don't they?
Yeah, yeah, it could be. I haven't cross-stitched for a long time, but that's an interesting idea.
[38:57] I like it, I like it. Let's see, was there anything else really important I wanted to make sure not to forget to ask you?
You know one thing I do want to do is I'd like to take your font and Take some I haven't knitted actually I'm gonna hold up for her I'm gonna show a little baby blanket that I just knitted recently actually horrible. It's not a baby blanket It's what I call a baby baby blanket, So you need a blanket for the baby?
But then you need a baby baby blanket and they can use it later when they grow up to put it on their own baby Y'all's and the babies the little kids love these so I'm making I'm crocheting another one for another grandchild I've got three of my head to make there.
That is such a good idea. And then they don't mess up the real one.
I mean, those get a lot of love is what I'm saying. And their parents are really like, no, no, no, we have to pack that away.
So when you eventually have a real baby, you know, you can do it too.
But I'd like to go back through some old patterns and just try to create the pattern in the font and see whether my brain could think that way.
I sent you a link to an article I did, the audience probably knows about this in case they don't remember it. It was called Knit Like a Programmer.
And that's where I read that. Yes.
[40:14] It was so exciting when you sent that to me. And that was back when we first, when you first made contact and I thought, this is one of my people.
The problem I was trying to solve in that, you've already read it recently, but to the audience is, is it was a pattern of, of when you looked at it in the picture, it was these blocks, like a, like a woven thing, like there's a square block of this, and then a square block of that, a square block of this, and it looked really good, but then they were staggered row to row, but then there were staggers within the staggers.
And so there were subroutines within the subroutines, and when you saw it from the, the big picture, you could tell what they were trying to do, but as you were going just stitch to stitch across, it was baffling when I was supposed to be changing and I simply couldn't keep track and I think that having a knitting font on that would have been genius.
[41:06] Well I hope if you try it, it works for you and if you run into any snags, I hope you'll let me know so I can go back and try and fix them.
I definitely would. Well if people want to connect up with you and talk about this and get all nerdy out and maybe even give you more information on this font thing for the Mac, it is the best place to talk to you on Mastodon?
Yeah, that's definitely a great place. I'm really active on Mastodon right now.
I'm really enjoying it there.
And so I'm, I'm frequently checking Mastodon. That's a great place for people to reach out.
They can also reach out at Kari Knitz at gmail.com.
I have that linked. So it forwards to my main account and I check it too, but honestly, Mastodon is going to be a better bet because my email account has gotten to the point where it's pretty clogged up.
Okay, I have one last really important question here. The name of the font is KAURI.
Where does that come from?
[42:05] I got the name kari from a series of books that I read back when I was in university, I had a roommate who had an amazing bookshelf and I tore through everything she had, And one series she had was the dancing god series by jack l chalker river of dancing gods demons of the dancing gods and, It was about a couple of humans who got pulled out of earth and into another world, That had been created using a few shortcuts. And so So instead of the natural processes that we would see here on Earth, they would use fairies to take some shortcuts to make sure that things still worked okay.
And one of the races of fairy was called the Kari.
And I just loved that name. I thought it was really cool.
So 19 year old me caught onto that name and I started using it as my online persona here and there and it just stuck.
[42:57] I love it. Well, from a woman who names herself Podfeet, I am not going to mock anybody else for using their 19-year-old favorite word. I see it's also a name for a plant in Maori, the native language in New Zealand.
Yeah, lovely tree, as it turns out. Look what I've learned today. Well, this has been great. And now, if people want to talk to you, is the best place to find you on Mastodon?
Yeah, definitely. Yep. Angela Preston at Tooth.site. site. Perfect. All right. Well, we'll, uh, we'll get together and talk about how to fix up that part about the Apple font.
But for everyone else, we're going to say goodbye here. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was super nerdy, crafty fun.
I loved it. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.
[43:45] I hope you enjoyed this episode of chit chat across the pond light.
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[44:45] Music.