Teaching my wife some CAD

[Moses Yoder]

My wife is looking at this program for celtic knots. http://www.clanbadge.com/ (http://www.clanbadge.com/) She wants to design her own knots for counted cross stitch black work. This is a font, and can be manipulated as such but for cross stitching it would require the font to be on a grid. They make a program for cross stitching but it would not work for blackwork because the blackwork stitch is a simple outline on squares, not a filled pattern. I am thinking the easiest way to put the font on a grid would be to install Double CAD on her computer, set up a grid for her and then show her how to enter text on it, manipulate it, and print it. What say you?

[Dan Hintz]

I'd say the easiest way would be to print it out at the size she wishes to work at (use a lighter color, like red), then overlay a grid printed onto acetate sheet. No need for CAD, and she can keep the entire "alphabet" printed out in multiple sizes.

[William Adams]

Better still would be to instead get a few books:

- George Bain's _Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction_ --- this is available as an inexpensive Dover reprint --- excellent background and history and discussion of underyling concepts.
- Aidan Meehan's _The Celtic Design Book (Celtic Design)_ --- collection of three books: Celtic Design: A Beginner's Manual, Knotwork, and Illuminated Letters --- Aidan Meehan has further developed the understanding of these knots and made their creation / design more efficient, see below for a computer implementation.

Then, use a special-purpose Celtic Knot program once you understand the underlying principles:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/knotter/

if you need the computer files --- I find them pleasant enough to do for manual work that it's always nicer just drawing them up by hand.

[Moses Yoder]

My wife has been drawing celtic knots for years using those two books. I find that downloading programs from sourceforge is very iffy. I do not know much about computers and many of those are just parts of programs with no description of what they are, how they work, or how to use them and install them, no support, and worth what you pay for them. Out of ten or so programs I have downloaded there one was worth it. I know this is different if you really know a lot about computers. I will probably install that program if I can figure out how and see what happens but it would be a real surprise if I can manage to make it work.

[William Adams]

I've found that so long as one does due diligence, one gets much better support w/ opensource software, so long as it's a live project, not an abandoned one.

This one is quite easy to install on Windows (it should auto-detect that you're running Windows and offer you the correct 32-bit or 64-bit version), and straightforward to get working on Linux.