bookfolder 0.4

Convert an image into a bookfolding pattern

Create Your Own Bookfolding Patterns

This tool allows you to generate bookfolding patters from images.

Each color of pixels in the image must correspond to one fold depth in the scuplture, with each horizontal pixel corresponding to one sheet of paper in the book and each vertical pixel to one "measurement interval" along the edge of the book.

If you use a traditional ruler, this measurement interval can be e.g. 1.0 mm, corresponding to the spacing between the markings in the ruler, or if you feel you can comfortably eyeball the midpoint between two markings, you can use 0.5 mm instead. For special tools, such as Incra rulers, the interval can be even shorter.

If your pattern has less sheets than your book has pages, or the book you use has pages without numbers, you can also set a custom start page for the pattern, so that the first sheet in the pattern is e.g. page 5 or "page -3".

Example

To create a pattern, you need a two-color image. The dimensions of the image must be compatible with the book you intend to use: each horizontal pixel corresponds to one sheet of paper in the book you are folding. You must also ensure that the image is not too high for your book. In this example, we will use examples/hearts-342x315.png).

The image is 342 pixels wide, so we'll need a book with at least 648 pages. Let's assume that the book we intend to fold has 700 pages, meaning that there will be a total of 8 sheets of paper in the book that do not belong to the pattern. We want to divide them evenly so that the pattern sits in the middle of the book, thus starting the pattern after the fourth sheet of paper in the book. Thus, given that the book does not have unnumbered pages, the pattern will start at page number 8.

Let's also assume that we are able to make the folds at 0.5 mm precision, meaning that each vertical pixel in the pattern corresponds to 0.5 mm along the edge of the book. This means that the height of the pattern along the edge of the book is 15.75 cm, which fits nicely in our imaginary book that is 16 cm high.

With this information, the pattern can be created using the command

bookfolder-cli --measurement-interval 0.5 --start-page 8 examples/hearts-342x315.png pdf-pattern examples/hearts.pdf

or by providing the corresponding information to the grapical version of the program. The resulting pattern can be found in examples/hearts.pdf.

Requirements

This software has been tested on Python 3.6, but will likely run on other versions of Python 3 too. If you use the graphical user interface, you also need to have python3-tkinter installed.

Installation

1. Ensure you have Python available on your system.
   • If you intend to use the graphical user interface, you also need the python3-tkinter package
2. Download this tool either using git clone or the "Download ZIP" button found under the green "Code" menu. If you downloaded the tool as a zip, extract it.
3. Navigate to the directory to which you downloaded/extracted this tool.
4. Install the tool using pip:

   pip install .
   

Usage

Windowed mode

After installing, you can start the program with command bookfolder.

Command-line use

See bookfolder-cli --help for information about available commands and their invocation.

License

This software is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0.