Designers have been drawing weaves (pattern drafts) on point paper for centuries. Many of them are still more comfortable with grid paper. But they do not have ArahWeave ;-)

It would be a very time consuming and error prone task to draw them again point by point into the CAD, even with all the fancy tools we offer (copy, mirror, shift, negate, etc.). We have developed a quick and easy way of restoring your past work. We can transform weaves from paper into digital weave format with unprecedented ease. First you have to scan your weaves at an appropriate resolution. Something like 120dpi will be fine for most of the cases. Save the image in JPEG format. As always with digital imagining, the GIGO (Garbage In - Garbage Out) rule applies. You will have good results if your weaves are drawn nicely, otherwise you will have more manual retouching at the end. The tools, which we have developed, are fault tolerant to a large extent; we do not pretend absolute precision in your old drawings. The picture in this example is from a book of weaves by Fressinet. It has been kindly provided by our customer G. & M. Gunetti, Chieri, Italy. You can look at the whole Fressinet book (and many others) if you surf to a wonderful site dedicated to old textile books created by prof. Ralph Griswold.

Load the image in ArahPaint. Rotate it by 90 degrees - click on icon in ArahPaint toolbox. If the image is slightly roated, you can click on icon in ArahPaint, and then click and draw what should be a straight line. You can use the edge of one of the pattern drafts as your guiding line. The program will then automatically rotate the image so that that line will become perfectly horizontal (or vertical). Now you have to reduce number of colors. Choose Reduce number of colors from Edit menu in color palette window. Select Black & white reduction type.

Click on Preview button. The image will be transformed into black and white mode. Use the threshold slider in Reduce number of colors window to adjust the transition from black to white. If the threshold is set to 0, the image is white, and if it is set to 255, the image is black. Usable values are between these two extremes. The scanned image is quite dark in our example, so we move the threshold towards white.

Select rectangular selection tool in ArahPaint's toolbar, and use mouse to draw a selection around the desired weave. Then apply function Tools > Guess weave from grid. The program will guess the real size of weave in pixels (one pixel is one point on a point paper). You should manually adjust this value, if program prompts you with incorrect values.

If you press Preview button, you can control, if the size of the proposed weave is correct, and if the edges of your selection are properly positioned, so the program can see and understand the weave. If settings are correct, the selected weave area will not change significantly, it will just appear a little cleaner. If it is wrong, you will see lines or large areas of changed weave colors. Once your are satisfied, press OK. Program will reduce size of selection to the size of weave in points that we have previously selected.

Now you just have to save weave (selection) with File > Save motif. Program saves it PNG graphical format. You can continue the above operations until you are done with all the weaves on this page. Now open ArahWeave. Switch the view mode to Weave so you will easily see if the repeat of the weave is correct. Then go in Weave menu and choose Edit. In Edit weave window Choose Files > Load weave and from File selection box choose the weave which you previously saved in PNG format.

There are many reasons for errors in weave recognition - noise from scanning, poor quality of original image, nonlinear image distortions, and plain old mistakes by the designer of the weave. We have developed a special function for automatic correction of weaves which have a clear geometrical logic like the one in our example. To activate it, use function Change > Magic weave correction. Calling it magic is slightly presumptuous, but try to find the error by yourself!

The error is located at warp 12 and weft 5 (from top). If you check the original weave as drawn by Fressinet, you will find out that automatic weave recognition was 100% correct, and that error was already in the original. This does not entitle us to say anything bad about Fressinet, since we are sure that he would not have done do the mistake, if he had at his disposal a tool like ArahWeave. We can only thank him for his incredible patience and manual precision.

After this just save weave in ArahWeave with Files > Save weave.

We have repeated this procedure more than 10.000 times during creation of our weave libraries. You can browse through weaves with Files > Browse. All the weaves which you create on your own are immediately browsable, as long as they are saved in Arahne's weave format.