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Introduction

Embroidered shirts are great custom gifts and can also be a great way to show your love for open source. This tutorial will demonstrate how to design your own custom embroidered polo shirt using Inkscape and Ink/Stitch. Polo shirts are often used for embroidery because they do not tear as easily as t-shirts when pierced by embroidery needles, though with care t-shirts can also be embroidered. This tutorial is a follow on article to Make More with Inkscape and Ink/Stitch and provides complete steps to create your design.

Logo on Front of Shirt

Pictures with only a few colors work well for embroidery. Let us use a public domain black and white SVG image of Tux created by Ryan Lerch and Garret LeSage.

Download this public domain image, tux-bw.svg, to your computer, and import it into your document as an editable SVG image using File>Import...

Use a Transparent Background

It is helpful to have a checkerboard background to distinguish background and foreground colors. Click File>Document Properties… and then check the box to enable a checkerboard background.

Then close the document properties dialog box. You can now distinguish between colors used on Tux and the background color.

Use a Single Color For Tux

Type s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, and click on the image of Tux to select it. Then click on Object>Fill and Stroke, in the menu. Type n to use the Edit paths by Nodes tool and click on a white portion of Tux. Within the Fill and Stroke pane change the fill to No paint to make this portion of Tux transparent.

Thi leaves the black area to be embroidered.

Enable Embroidering of Tux

Now convert the image for embroidery. Type s to use the Select and Transform objects tool and click on the image of Tux to select it again. Choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Fill Tools>Break Apart Fill Objects … In the resulting pop up, choose Complex, click Apply, and wait for the operation to complete.

For further explanation of this operation, see the Ink/Stitch documentation.

Resize Document

Now resize the area to be embroidered. A good size is about 2.75 inches by 2.75 inches. Press s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, and select Tux, hold down the shift key, and also select any text area. Then choose Object>Transform …, click on Scale in the dialogue box, change the measurements to inches, check the Scale proportionally box and choose a width of 2.75 inches, and click Apply.

Before saving the design, reduce the document area to just fit the image. Press s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, then select Tux.

Choose File>Document Properties… then choose Resize to content: or press Ctrl+Shift+R

The document is resized.

Save Your Design

You now need to convert your file to an embroidery file. A very portable format is the DST (Tajima Embroidery Format) format, which unfortunately does not have color information, so you will need to indicate color information for the embroidery separately. First save your design as an Inkscape SVG file so that you retain a format that you can easily edit again. Choose File>Save As, then select the Inkscape SVG format and enter a name for your file, for example AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.svg and save your design. Then choose File>Save As and select the DST file format and save your design. Generating this file requires calculation of stitch locations, this may take a few seconds. You can preview the DST file in Inkscape, but another very useful tool is vpype-embroidery

Install vpype-embroidery on the command line using a Python virtual environment via the following commands:

virtualenv test-vpype
source test-vpype/bin/activate
pip install matplotlib
pip install vpype-embroidery
pip install vpype[all]

Preview your DST file (in this case named AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.dst which should be replaced by the filename you choose if it is different), using this command:

vpype eread AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.dst show

Check the dimensions of your design, if you need to resize it, you should resize the SVG design file before exporting it as a DST file. Resizing the DST file is not recommended since it contains stitch placement information, regenerate this placement information from the resized SVG file to obtain a high quality embroidered result.

Text on the Back of the Shirt

Now create a message to put on the back of your polo shirt. Create a new Inkscape document using File>New. Then choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Lettering.

Choose a font, for example Geneva Simple Sans created by Daniel K. Schneider in Geneva. If you want to resize your text, do so at this point using the scale section of the dialog box since resizing it once it is in Inkscape will distort the resulting embroidered pattern. Add your text,

Another Awesome Fedora Linux User

A preview will appear, click on Quit

Then click on Apply and Quit in the lettering creation dialog box. Your text should appear in your Inkscape document.

Create a checkered background and resize the document to content by opening up the document properties dialog box File>Document Properties…

Your document should now be a little larger than your text.

Clean Up Stitches

Many commercial embroidery machines support jump instructions which can save human time in finishing the embroidered garment. Examine the text preview image. A single continuous thread sews all the letters. Stitches joining the letters are typically removed. These stitches can either be cut by hand after the embroidery is done, or they can be cut by the embroidery machine if it supports jump instructions. Ink/Stitch can add these jump instructions.

Add jump instructions by selecting View>Zoom>Zoom Page to enlarge the view of the drawing. Press s to choose the Select and transform objects tool. Choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Commands>Attach Commands to Selected Objects. A dialog box should appear, check just the Trim thread after sewing this object option.

Then click in the drawing area and select the first letter of the text

Then click Apply, and some cut symbols should appear above the letter.

Repeat this process for all letters.

Now save your design, as before, in both SVG and DST formats. Check the likely quality of the embroidered text by previewing your DST file (in this case named AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserBack.dst – replaced this by the filename you chose), using

vpype eread AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserBack.dst show

Check the dimensions of your design, if you need to resize it, you should resize the SVG design file before exporting it as a DST file.

Create a Mockup

To show the approximate placement of your design on the polo shirt create a mockup. You can then send this to an embroidery company with your DST file. The Fedora Design Team has a wiki page with examples of mockups. An example mockup made using Kolourpaint is below.

You can also use an appropriately licensed drawing of a polo shirt, for example from Wikimedia Commons.

Example Shirt

Pictures of a finished embroidered polo shirt are below

Further Information

A three color image of Tux is also available, but single colors are easiest to achieve good embroidered results with. Adaptation of this shaded multiple color image is required to use it for embroidery. Additional tutorial information is available on the Ink/Stitch website.

Some companies that can do embroidery given a DST file include:

• Pappagallo Clothing Industry based in Cyprus
• Target Solutions based in Ghana
• Marvel Ark based in Kenya
• Core Digital based in South Africa
• Embroidery Your Way based in the USA

Search the internet for machine embroidery services close to you or a hackerspace with an embroidery machine you can use.

This article has benefited from many helpful suggestions from Michael Njuguna of Marvel Ark and Brian Lee of Embroidery Your Way.

The first concerted effort to support accessibility under Linux was undertaken by Sun Microsystems when they decided to use GNOME for Solaris. Sun put together a team focused on building the pieces to make GNOME 2 fully accessible and worked with hardware makers to make sure things like Braille devices worked well. I even heard claims that GNOME and Linux had the best accessibility of any operating system for a while due to this effort. As Sun started struggling and got acquired by Oracle this accessibility effort eventually trailed off with the community trying to pick up the slack afterwards. Especially engineers from Igalia were quite active for a while trying to keep the accessibility support working well.

But over the years we definitely lost a bit of focus on this and we know that various parts of GNOME 3 for instance aren’t great in terms of accessibility. So at Red Hat we have had a lot of focus over the last few years trying to ensure we are mindful about diversity and inclusion when hiring, trying to ensure that we don’t accidentally pre-select against underrepresented groups based on for instance gender or ethnicity. But one area we realized we hadn’t given so much focus recently was around technologies that allowed people with various disabilities to make use of our software. Thus I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!

Anyone who has ever worked for a large company knows that getting funding for new initiatives is often hard and can take a lot of time, but I want to highlight how I was extremely positively surprised at how quick and easy it was to get support for hiring Lukas to work on accessibility. When Jiri Eischmann and I sent the request to my manager, Stef Walter, he agreed to champion the same day, and when we then sent it up to Mike McGrath who is the Vice President of Linux Engineering he immediately responded that he would bring this to Tim Cramer who is our Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. Within a few days we had the go ahead to hire Lukas. The fact that everyone just instantly agreed that accessibility is important and something we as a company should do made me incredibly proud to be a Red Hatter.

What we hope to get from this is not only a better experience for our users, but also to allow even more talented engineers like Lukas to work on Linux and open source software at Red Hat. I thought it would be a good idea here to do a quick interview with Lukas Tyrychtr about the state of accessibility under Linux and what his focus will be.

Christian: Hi Lukas, first of all welcome as a full time engineer to the team! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Lukas: Hi, Christian. For sure. I am a completely blind person who can see some light, but that’s basically it. I started to be interested in computers around 2009 or so, around my 15th or 16th birthday. First, because of circumstances, I started tinkering with Windows, but Linux came shortly after, mainly because of some pretty good friends. Then, after four years the university came and the Linux knowledge paid off, because going through all the theoretical and practical Linux courses there was pretty straightforward (yes, there was no GUI involved, so it was pretty okay, including some custom kernel configuration tinkering). During that time, I was contacted by Red Hat associates whether I’d be willing to help with some accessibility related presentation at our faculty, and that’s how the collaboration began. And, yes, the hire is its current end, but that’s actually, I hope, only the beginning of a long and productive journey.

Christian: So as a blind person you have first hand experience with the state of accessibility support under Linux. What can you tell us about what works and what doesn’t work?

Lukas: Generally, things are in pretty good shape. Braille support on text-only consoles basically just always works (except for some SELinux related issues which cropped up). Having speech there is somewhat more challenging, the needed kernel module (Speakup for the curious among the readers) is not included by all distributions, unfortunately it is not included by Fedora, for example, but Arch Linux has it. When we look at the desktop state of affairs, there is basically only a single screen reader (an application which reads the screen content), called Orca, which might not be the best position in terms of competition, but on the other hand, stealing Orca developers would not be good either. Generally, the desktop is usable, at least with GTK, Qt and major web browsers and all recent Electron based applications. Yes, accessibility support receives much less testing than I would like, so for example, a segmentation fault with a running screen reader can still unfortunately slip through a GTK release. But, generally, the foundation works well enough. Having more and naturally sounding voices for speech synthesis might help attract more blind users, but convincing all the players is no easy work. And then there’s the issue of developer awareness. Yes, everything is in some guidelines like the GNOME ones, however I saw much more often than I’d like to for example a button without any accessibility labels, so I’d like to help all the developers to fix their apps so accessibility regressions don’t get to the users, but this will have to improve slowly, I guess.

Christian: So you mention Orca, are there other applications being widely used providing accessibility?

Lukas: Honestly, only a few. There’s Speakup – a kernel module which can read text consoles using speech synthesis, e.g. a screen reader for these, however without something like Espeakup (an Espeak to Speakup bridge) the thing is basically useless, as it by default supports hardware synthesizers, however this piece of hardware is basically a think of the past, e.g. I have never seen one myself. Then, there’s BRLTTY. This piece of software provides braille output for screen consoles and an API for applications which want to output braille, so the drivers can be implemented only once. And that’s basically it, except for some efforts to create an Orca alternative in Rust, but that’s a really long way off. Of course, utilities for other accessibility needs exist as well, but I don’t know much about these.

Christian: What is your current focus for things you want to work on both yourself and with the larger team to address?

Lukas: For now, my focus is to go through the applications which were ported to GTK 4 as a part of the GNOME development cycle and ensure that they work well. It includes adding a lot of missing labels, but in some cases, it will involve bigger changes, for example, GNOME Calendar seems to need much more work. During all that, educating developers should not be forgotten either. With these things out of the way, making sure that no regressions slip to the applications should be addressed by extending the quality assurance and automated continuous integration checks, but that’s a more distant goal.

Christian: Thank you so much for talking with us Lukas, if there are other people interested in helping out with accessibility in Fedora Workstation what is the best place to reach you?

Actually for now the easiest way to reach me is by email at [email protected]. Be happy to talk to anyone wanting to help with making Workstation great for accessibility.

The kernel team is working on final integration for Linux kernel 5.18. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week now through Sunday, June 12, 2022. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

How does a test week work?

A test week is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:

• Download test materials, which include some large files
• Read and follow directions step by step

The wiki page for the kernel test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results. We have a document which provides all the steps written.

Happy testing, and we hope to see you on test day.