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InkSim

InkSim is a standalone interactive embroidery simulator and preview renderer. It opens embroidery files, displays their stitch sequence, and lets the user inspect or replay the design before production.

The viewer now includes an OpenGL textured renderer that draws stitches as realistic ribbon quads with normal-mapped thread and Blinn-Phong lighting. Press Z in the viewer to toggle between the CPU and GPU renderers. The GPU renderer requires OpenGL 3.3; older systems and virtual machines fall back to the CPU raster renderer automatically.

InkSim preview

InkSim is experimental software provided for development and testing.

Installation

Install the published PyPI package with uv:

uv tool install inksim

Then run it directly from your shell:

inksim design.pes

Use inksim-gui design.pes to launch without a console window. The command names behave consistently on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

See installation and running for pip/virtual-environment installation and developer setup.

Quick start

inksim
inksim design.pes
inksim design.pes --play

Documentation

Background

The idea behind this tool dates back to 2013 with an experimental C++/Qt project called Orca, which originally explored graph algorithms for Inkscape on Linux before turning into a digitizer and stitch viewer. Here is an old recording of that early prototype in action:

Orca viewer demo

InkSim is a fresh, standalone rewrite of that viewer concept -- built from scratch using Python, PySide6, and Numba. The main goal is to provide a fast, lightweight way to preview embroidery files without heavy overhead.

It was built to fill a small workflow gap, and it's shared with the hope that others in the Inkscape and Ink/Stitch community might find it helpful as well.

Special thanks to the Ink/Stitch team and community for keeping open-source embroidery alive and inspiring.

License

InkSim is released under the GNU General Public License v3 or later.

Metadata

Release files for inksim 0.3.2

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for inksim 0.3.2
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inksim-0.3.2.tar.gz 476.4 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for inksim 0.3.2
File Interpreter ABI Platform
inksim-0.3.2-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 972.1 kB

Release files / inksim-0.3.2.tar.gz

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Size 476.4 kB
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Release files / inksim-0.3.2-py3-none-any.whl

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