**video demo:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbghtqziB1g
This branch adds a new extension, Auto-Route Satin Columns, implementing #214! This is a huge new feature that opens the door wide for exciting stuff like lettering (#142).
To use it, select some satin columns and run the extension. After a few seconds, it will replace your satins with a new set with a logical stitching order. Under-pathing and jump-stitches will be added as necessary, and satins will be broken to facilitate jumps. The resulting satins will retain all of the parameters you had set on the original satins, including underlay, zig-zag spacing, etc.
By default, it will choose the left-most extreme as the starting point and the right-most extreme as the ending point (even if these occur partway through a satin such as the left edge of a letter "o"). You can override this by attaching the new "Auto-route satin stitch starting/ending position" commands.
There's also an option to add trims instead of jump stitches. Any jump stitch over 1mm is trimmed. I might make this configurable in the future but in my tests it seems to do a good job. Trim commands are added to the SVG, so it's easy enough to modify/delete as you see fit.
You can't have a module and a package named the same thing. PyInstaller wants
to import the main script as if it were a module, and this doesn't work unless
there's no directory of the same name with a __init__.py in it.
* Simulate now works regardless of the output format you chose when you ran Embroider.
* Simulate (and the preview in Params) now respects TRIMs.
* Inkscape restart required (embroider.inx changed).
This one kind of grew in the telling. #37 was a theoretically simple bug, but in reality, the code necessary to fix it was the straw that broke the camel's back, and I had to do a fair bit of (much needed) code reorganization. Mostly the reorganization was just under the hood, but there was one user-facing change around the Embroider extension's settings window.
Way back in the day, the only way to control things like the stitch length or satin density was through global options specified in the extension settings. We've long since moved to per-object params, but for backward compatibility, ink/stitch defaulted to the command-line arguments.
That means that it was possible to get different stitch results from the same SVG file if you changed the extension's settings. For that reason, I never touched mine. I didn't intend for my users to use those extension-level settings at all, and I've planned to remove those settings for awhile now.
At this point, the extension settings just getting in the way of implementing more features, so I'm getting rid of them and moving the defaults into the parameters system. I've still left things like the output format and the collapse length (although I'm considering moving that one too).
Kate Murphy