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Creating .octofont fonts

An .octofont is a true embroidery font — its letters are real satin columns with proper embroidery construction, not filled TTF outlines. You build one glyph at a time from objects you’ve already digitised, then use the font in any text box.

The authoring flow

Section titled “The authoring flow”

The core idea: digitise a letter the way you want it stitched, then register it as a glyph in a font.

  1. Digitise a glyph on the canvas — typically as satin columns — and select the object(s) that make it up.
  2. Choose Tools → Add to font…
  3. In the dialog, tell Octostitch what this glyph is:
    • the character it represents,
    • its left and right bounds (the horizontal spacing / side bearings), and
    • the baseline it sits on.
  4. Save it into a new font (give it a name and an em size in mm) or add it to an existing .octofont.

Repeat for each character. Octostitch remembers the font you last saved into, so authoring a whole alphabet defaults to the same target.

Saving & sharing

Section titled “Saving & sharing”

Your custom fonts appear in the font picker for text boxes automatically. Each font is a single self-contained .octofont file, so sharing one — or moving it to another machine — is just a matter of copying the file into the fonts folder.

For now, the user fonts folder is:

  • Windows — %APPDATA%\octostitch\fonts
  • macOS / Linux — octostitch/fonts under your config directory (e.g. ~/.config/octostitch/fonts)

Drop an .octofont there and it’ll show up in the font picker; copy one out to share it. Octostitch reads its bundled fonts and your user fonts folder, with your fonts taking priority if a name clashes.

The Add to font dialog showing a stitched “S” between its left and right bound guides, sitting on the baseline. The Add to font dialog — drag the left, right and baseline guides to set the glyph’s metrics, then assign it a character and a target font.