It’s possible I’ve overlooked something, but is it possible to label the lines of a piece with their lengths? I mostly want it for quick visual reference, both within Seamly and on the printed pattern. So far, I have:
Drafted a pattern
Created my pieces
Added pattern and piece labels with templates
My current approach is to just hardcode the dimensions in the piece label, which is cumbersome and requires me to manually update the labels anytime a piece changes. I thought maybe creating custom variables with line length formulas would make this easier, but I haven’t figured out how to use them in labels. I see wildcards for ‘size’ and ‘height,’ but don’t know what those reference. Hope that makes sense!
There was a recent discussion about just this subject, I don’t remember well enough to search it up for you, @Douglas probably could. As I recall, it basically amounted to that being incompatible with the way the labels are programmed.
It is possible to get a tooltip with that information by hovering your cursor over the pertinent object.
Can I assume you want to be able create a label that customizes based on the measurements used say for ex: the inseam of a pair trousers based on an inseam curve? Or maybe a better exaample would be a label that includes the Chest, Waist, and Hips.
Not possible at this time. The only way to customize labels is by inserting a “place holder” variable from the existing hard coded list. The labels don’t have access to all the tool variables such as length and angle or any mesurements from a vit or vst file.
These will only work if you are using a multisize measurement file where you can change the size and height in the bottom right of your screen:
If this is for the purpose of ‘walking the seams’ to ensure that they’re the same length, I normally add a line for the one seam and label it accordingly and then use the Point on Line tool to add another node for the other seam - also labelled accordingly but normally of a different color so that it stands out. This way, I can see at a glance that the 2 seamlines will match or within an acceptable distance.
However, this still won’t add the measurements to your pattern labels.
There is another pattern data feature in File>Pattern Preferances that you can explore to see if it will meet your needs:
I used this technique all the time… but it’s not limited to seam length. It could be for example checking if the Chest, Waist, and Hips match up to a person’s measurements within reason.
Here’s a pattern from an Annie vest we did. The 2 lines are the aggregate of all the formula lengths that make up the chest and waist.
Could this requirement be easily met by being able to specify on an ‘internal path’ of a piece, to display its measurement?
Either a checkbox ‘Show measurement’
Or a label on in internal path in which you could use a keyword. E.g. “Some text here %dimension%” which would output as “Some text here 34.4cm”
I can mock this up in my-pattern.cloud if that would be useful? I just can’t add it to the .val file format.
Really appreciate the replies everyone! For context, I’m mostly a hobbyist bag maker, but designing some bigger projects and trying to get organized. Still very new to Seamly and I hadn’t explored Measurements much, thinking it was primarily for garment making - something I haven’t done. That said, I played around with it a bit yesterday, made a measurements file with the basic bag dimensions, and used the values when drafting. That alone is an improvement over sticking them in custom variables tied to the pattern, so thanks for steering me there. I’ll spend some more time to understand that process.
I like drafting patterns in Seamly, but I don’t necessarily print them all, so when I’m transferring to fabric/paper being able to just look up and check the length of a cut is handy. For now I think I can get away with having custom variables on screen and calculating the important dimensions.
@Douglas I do like the method of drawing secondary lines for measurements - that makes the hover tooltip behavior less tedious. Let me try that, too.
That would be pretty nice I think. I guess ultimately being able to reference variables/measurements in labels would be most ideal.
No. Internal paths are just a vector of point nodes that get added as another QPainterPath to the QPainterPath of a piece. Ipaths only have a name that shows in the Internal Paths list in the Piece Dialog. They are not a variable and have no defined length. Therefore there is no way to add them to a label.
Not so easy to just add placeholders. Have to define the pl string, have add it to the (translated) variables list, have to add it to the list in the template dialog, and code to handle the variable in the text manager - which includes code to get the actual value that being put in the place holder. Where the data value is coming from could be any number of places… the pref settings, the pattern document, the data container, hardcoded tr() strings, the system locale, etc, etc.
Experimenting in the development version of the cloud environment, I’ve added a show-length option to a drawing object with three options: none; with label; and along line. And here’s how I’m rendering it. My thought is that it would also be useful to have this option on a group, and on an internal path on a piece.
Could be useful to some users. It’s more a drafting dimension feature generally not found on garment patterns. In all the 42+ years I’ve been drafting patterns, it would be rare if ever that I used a dimension on a garment pattern.
I love that idea and can see that it will be really handy for people who are giving classes in pattern making.
Some of the pattern making books give you a set size to work with (perhaps a size 12) and the measurements used in the pattern piece. Then with their instructions, they give the formulas to use and on the side, they tell you what the resulting length will be. This way, you can see at a glance that you are getting the same result as the instructor got in the book.
True. But it’s not displayed on the drafting itself. It’s more or less like we’ve been discussing in the other topic of having “checks” in a dock. Not to mention you can already get length / angle info from the hover tooltip.
That being said… if I were to implement dimensions I would 1) Display them in Piece Mode 2) Display curve sections as well as lines… or more specifically the distance between each point node. Like:
Yes, I like the idea for the Pattern Cloud, but if you look at my patterns, they’re already so very busy, that I don’t think we need it for Seamly2D. I prefer the idea of the ‘Checks’ dock
Wow! that could work beautifully for people teaching pattern making and they normally need the node labels visible in their diagrams used in their teaching materials, too, so perhaps you can do that as an on/off option while you’re thinking of implementing this at some future date.
I don’t know if this is the right thread, but I’ve been looking for a way to add a label to a internal path, in piece mode.
For example showing “waistline” next to the dashed line corresponding to the waist level.
It’s not a fabric cut but something useful in the exported pdf…
