In an attempt to get a proper grip on TH knots and their variants, I made a program to design them and to get printable patterns and instructions.
Heavily inspired by GridMaker by Tim Allwine, but also fairly extendend and it doesn't use any of his codebase. If you are familiar with GridMaker, you will feel at home. It differs in (at least) the following ways:
* It's a Windows program, not web based. It will also run under Wine in Linux. I have nothing against the web, it's just a matter of my personal preference in development tools.
* It uses real world units (metric, get over it you backward USAians

), not pixels.
* It gives a good estimate of cord length needed. It's calculated without safety margins, though, so don't forget to add them.
* It gives the diameter the printed pattern will have when rolled on the dowel.
* It counts the number of over crossings and under crossings. For some patterns, these may be very different, and a lot of work can be saved by mirroring the pattern so that you'll get more over crossings and less under crossings.
* It has a print function that has the accuracy that the printer can provide, making it easier to get a good fit on the dowel. This is very difficult to get from a web app.
* The print function tiles properly, with clear numbers assisting assembly, should the pattern not fit on one page.
* The print function should properly handle any size paper (although I won't guarantee anything smaller than A4/US letter).
* The printed instructions are nicely "pyjama-striped" for clarity.
* It comes with a small library of preset patterns to start with. You can, of course, still provide your own patterns.
* It can save patterns, so that you can load them at a later time. The file extension is .thp.
* By clicking on the pattern image, you can flip any crossing back and forth between over and under, allowing patterns that are not symmetrical. This means that
you can even do symbols and text!The last point is, imho, by far the coolest. The rest may be practical, but that one is raw, primitive cool!
Download link (approx 1 MB):
http://rpglab.net/nobackup/thmaker/THMaker-Setup.exeScreenshots:
Heart. Is included as an example pattern as heart.thp.
An attempted knot with my girlfriends name, intended as a gift. It had too long between some over/under-switches, though, so I didn't manage to get it neat, things kept sliding sideways, so I tore it up and made a simpler design (the saved pattern "chevron.thp" included as an example in the download.Usage is completely free, but if you want to give it to someone else, give them the link above, as that will always hold the latest version. The program is supplied as it, with no guarantees (except that I guarantee that I have not put any malicious code in it). That said, comments and suggestions are welcome.
Source code is probably not available, as I feel that it does not live up to my standards in code aesthetics.
I learned a lot about TH knots when I made this program, so if you are a programmer who can't get your TH's right, I challenge you to do a better program.You'll also learn a lot.
Pretty neat for a guy that has made less turks head than he has fingers (and who has a fairly average number of fingers), eh?