Custom Squiggles

In this document, I will describe the process of making your own squiggle pattern. If you want me to include your pattern in a future edition of WildTools, I will expect you to follow the process listed below with real precision.

Alfred Scott

1. Create the original wiggly line pattern. If you want to produce a line that has a hand-drawn appearance, the best way to do this is by drawing the original line on a piece of paper, with a pen or pencil. Try drawing a number of such lines, roughly horizontal, and typically 3 to 5 inches long until you get a line with the right 'flavor'.

2. Scan this drawing at about 150 dpi. In Photoshop, sharpen the image as necessary and then convert it to a black & white bitmap, still at 150 dpi.

3. Import the bitmap into PowerCADD.

4. At the left side of the line, create a vertical line.

5. Use the Offset Repeat tool to create a series of vertical guidelines spaced along the bitmap. These must be spaced at .0125" apart. (Don't argue about this spacing. To fit into Squiggle you must do this.)

6. On a separate layer, zoom in close and place a point on each guideline where the squiggly line crosses the guideline.

7. Reset the origin to the leftmost point. The rightmost point on the line must also be at the vertical coordinate of the origin, and the ending slope of the wiggly line must be the same as the starting slope.

8. With the drawing coordinate units set to decimal inches, write down all of the vertical coordinates of your points. We're only interested in the vertical coordinates.

9. Type these coordinates in a vertical column in Excel or any other spreadsheet. We'll call this column 1.

10. In column 2, subtract the previous column 1 cell from the column 1 cell. In other words, this is the vertical distance of the change of each point. This is the 'Delta' or slope column.

11. Plot the Delta numbers in a line chart using the charting capability of the program. As you will see, there will be a lot of sharp changes to the slopes. For a line to look really hand-drawn, you must adjust the coordinates of column 1 slightly so that the chart of the delta moves starts to smooth out. This is the most critical stage of the process and will take the most time. But remember that the line must have the same ending slope as the beginning slope and the line must return to 0.

12. When you have fully adjusted the numbers, create in column 3 a copy of the values in the first column * 72 * 65536. Format these numbers for no decimal place.

13. Create a column 4 with a comma in the cell.

14. Select all of column 3 and 4 and paste into a Microsoft Word file and send this to me. You should have a series of numbers that look like this:

23592,
9437,
14155,
27367,
8021,
-943,
-7077,
-44826,
-85878,
-26424,
-9437,
-471,
6134,
12740,
16043,
14155,
9437,
7549,

It does not matter how many numbers you have, but the pattern used in Squiggle has about 160 points.

15. I will then take the numbers and put them into a resource format, and I will send back to you the pattern in a ResEdit file, which will contain both the original pattern, your pattern, and any others that other people have created.

16. Use ResEdit to copy these resources (except the old one of ID 5000) into the WildTools external.

17. WildTools uses the resource of type 'LngA' and ID of 5000. The only way you can use your pattern (at this time) is to change the ID numbers of the various 'LngA' resources so that the one you want to use has an ID of 5000. You can change the ID number of the others to any other numbers, but typically these should be above 5000, so use 5020, 5021, 5022, etc. as a way of parking the other patterns within WildTools. There must be one 'LngA' resource of ID 5000 in WildTools for it to work. Other 'LngA' resources may be in the WildTools external file, and they will be ignored by WildTools, however in the future, as we develop more patterns, the ID numbers of 5001, 5002, 5003, etc. will be used, and the use will be able to select these with buttons in the Squiggle dialog.