Supporting paperless patterns

The goal of paperless patterns is to create a pattern that we don’t need to print to be able to use it. Saving paper is always a good thing, but it’s also a way to democratize access to patterns. While more and more of humanity is on the internet, access to printers and printing paper is often harder to come by, especially in developing countries.

So let’s make the extra effort to make our bib design support paperless.

The paperless setting

Users can request paperless patterns by setting the paperless setting to a truthy value.

With paperless enabled, FreeSewing will automatically render a grid for each pattern part with metric or imperial markings, depending on the units requested by the user.

Such a grid is already a good starting point. In addition, we’ll be using different macros to add dimensions to the pattern.

While the grid gets added automatically, the dimensions we have to add ourselves. Thankfully, there’s macros that can help us with that, specifically:

• The hd macro adds a horizontal dimension
• The vd macro adds a vertical dimension
• The ld macro adds a linear dimension
• The pd macro adds a path dimension that follows a given path

These macros will also adapt to the units chosen by the user (metric or imperial).