You probably noticed several unusual things about Inkscape when you did the first tutorial. Little things, like when you clicked on a purl marker that was already inside the grid, you accidentally selected the grid...The stitches aren't perfectly aligned and if you're not careful the end result looks like something a three-year-old created. Last of all, the lovely scalable vector graphics (“SVG”) file you created isn't something you can insert into your average word processor. The point of Charting 101 was to expose you to the basic concept and gave you an exercise to practice your skills. But it didn't create an output you can actually send to a magazine or place in your patterns. Making your chart look pretty and professional requires a better understanding of guides and layers.

What is a guide?

Guides are a lot like stitch markers. They mark where you want the edge of an object to go. Turn on snapping and they automatically draw the object to the edge. (Snapping is on by default.)

What is a layer?

Do you remember the transparencies in science class? The ones you used for dissection? The teacher would lay different transparencies on top of each other to create a full image and then take them away to show you each step of the dissection. Layers are exactly like that without the formaldehyde.

In a moment, I will walk you through some basic cleanup procedures. Some, such as creating your own guides and using snapping can be done when you first create the graph and were not included in the previous tutorial because of length issues. Since how you create your final copy depends on your personal work flow and preference, you should read all the material highlighted in the Basic Skills Overview. There is a suggested method below the tutorial, but it isn't set in stone. Please play around with this and learn what works best for you.

Basic Skills Overview:

• Snapping and Guides Basics
• How to Create Guides
• Managing Layers

How-to:

1. Open the file created in Charting 101.
2. Click Layer > Layers to open the layer dialog. In the box on the far right, you will see a list of all the layers in your chart. Each one has a little eye and an open lock beside it. The eye turns visibility on and off. If you click the lock, you cannot edit the layer.
3. Hit the lock button beside every layer. Now, drag your grid lines. (See the How to Create Guides reference for better instructions.) What you want is a horizontal line at the bottom of every row and a vertical line at about the 1/3 mark of every column.
4. Click the lock symbol beside the stitches layer to unlock the layer. Go to File > Document Properties. Click the Snap tab and make sure “Enable snapping” is checked.
5. Now drag each stitch until it locks in place. (Normally, this is a tiny little movement and the stitch jerks on the screen a little so that its left edge is next to the vertical guide.) Click the image below to see a full-size version.
   
6. Tip: To check your final stitch alignment, hit the eye next to Layer 1 and turn visibility off. Take a look at your stitches and make sure they are aligned right. Then turn the visibility back on.
7. To use your chart, go to File > Export Bitmap. Set the DPI to 300. Choose your file name and location and click Export. You now have a .png of your final output.

Notes and Other Thoughts

Some of you are probably reading this and thinking something along the lines “But so and so's guidelines say that all images must be .jpeg...” You can convert your .png into a .jpeg using just about any standard image editor, such as GIMP or the little program that came with your digital camera. However, you should always save your working copy as a .png.

PNG is a lossless format. JPEG is lossy. (This carton illustrates the difference very nicely.) For charts, PNGs really are the best image format, particularly for web publication. However, photographs should be JPEGs. A quick glance through the online knitting mags shows that most of them use .jpegs, .gifs, and .pngs. If you believe this will be a problem, send your charts as both .jpegs and .pngs. When in doubt, ask and/or offer options.

Microsoft is pretty notorious for being several years behind everyone else with their support of open standards. Part of this delay is business practices, but another part of it is their long release cycle. New features are included in the next update which is several years away when everyone else updates (i.e new version) more frequently. For many years, PNGs with transparent backgrounds were a major pain in Internet Explorer. There is a script that fixes this problem and I employ it on several websites I maintain. However, you should not rely on this script. Open your .png in GIMP, Photoshop, or SUMO Paint (a very nice, Photoshop like free web application). Add a white layer behind your image and save it as a .png. Since your image now has a background, there shouldn't be any rendering problems.