Display memo data to the user.

[Adrienne200]

Brother’s Memo function was basically notes to the operator as reminders of when to change color, or when to switch from using the lace carriage to the knit carriage. You give it the information when designing the pattern file, and it reminds you at the appropriate row as you knit.

On the 930/940 the Memo display was a single 7-segment display, it could tell you about up to 8 contrast colors (typically 1 is the background, 2-9 for contrasts) and two symbols to be the N or F setting on the lace carriage. On the 910 there are 4 columns on the side of the mylar where you could mark where to change color, it also had a column for lace information. Again only information for the operator, not the machine.

I think that most machine-knitting software solves this need for meta-data by making its own proprietary file format, which I don't think we want to do. I’m wondering if it could be done with some sort of sidecar file or xmp? Or by being able to display in the UI line-by-line from a text file that has the same number of lines as the image has rows.

[dl1com]

We already talked about this a while ago in the FB group.
The very best solution would be to have the Open Knitting File format @kirstin and @niccokunzmann worked on some time ago.
But to be honest, I have no idea if there has been any progress since the time this GSoC project was finished. @niccokunzmann, @kirstin do you have any information if this was still a topic in FOSSASIA?

Speaking in general, it's a question of effort once again. Defining and implementing some metadata file with the same filename as the pattern file, containing meta info (color, type of carriage, ...) per line, corresponding to the lines of the pattern and showing this information during knitting should not be a big deal.

[niccokunzmann]

There has been no progress on the knitting pattern format we proposed since the Google Summer of Code we worked on. I do not know if there will be. It may be this summer, if we put effort into it to get new students onto the knitting software.

[Adrienne200]

The separate metadata file seems to be the way to go for now.
Longer term it would be great if Nicco or someone else could pick that project up again some time. Maybe next year? It laid some great groundwork, and was just getting to the fun part, so close to being usable on the machine, but not quite.

[t0mpr1c3]

The Knit Progress window forthcoming in release 1.0.0 will provide a way to present line-by-line memo data.

It does not seem likely that there will be further progress on the knitting pattern format in the near future. If I have time I will try to come back to this issue after the 1.0.0 release.