Process to Digitize a printed pattern

[Eurekan]

If you've ever used a pattern out of a magazine or printed plan you probably at one time or another run into the need to plot the points of the pattern off a grid. Here is how I do it and thought I would share.

You must have a scanner to be able to capture an electronic file. Actually I guess you could carefully use a camera too. As long as everything is as square and equal as possible. I found a program name Plot Digitizer available from Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/plotdigitizer/ The program is free to use. You will need to have Java installed on your PC. That download is also available and the link is shown on that page.

So here is my capture of a rocker pattern. About 4 inches long on the page so difficult to pull plot points from it accurately.




Open the program and then import the file. Should look like this...


The program will make you calibrate the X and Y axis first then its a simple matter of selecting the points of interest.  The cross hair is located just to the right of the 5 line. When you are finished or want to see what you've got so far just click on the "Done" and a chart will come up.


There are more options too such as the length of the line and some other info. Continue until done and you can then save the file of digitized points. This is a text file in .csv format. (Sorry to get too technical) This file can be imported into any spreadsheet or printed directly.



That's it. The only issue may be too much data!. This will also show you how badly your plan is printed.  For this example I only took points at the 1,2,3,4... X lines and as you can see there is considerable variation from a whole number.

Good Luck.