Fabrico (production tooling) · Apparel
Slicing wall-sized patterns onto A4 — cut to storefront
Sewing patterns are designed at full size — often A0–A1 — but home printers only do A4. Poster Splitter takes one big PDF and lays it out across dozens of A4 sheets that overlap by a set margin, so they glue back into the exact original at 100% scale. Built for a real sewing-pattern shop, the output matches what the industry expects: assembly rectangles, glue bands and numbered sheets — plus a companion WooCommerce plugin that pushes finished patterns straight into the store.
Im Produkt
Die Lücke
There was already a program — but it was broken. A Go/Fyne build mangled vector content with the gopdf/gofpdi libraries, shifted regions and printed off-scale, with a janky UI and fragile packaging. And the finished patterns still had to reach the store, split across a 2-D size × height matrix of product variations.
Das Insight
The fix wasn't patching the old tool — it was a clean rewrite on a PDF engine that clips and places regions at true 1:1 scale, keeping text and cut lines vector. And on the store side, each variation's own attribute slugs could decide which file belongs to it — one rule for the whole catalogue.
Produkt-Tour
Vector-accurate tiling
Rebuilt from scratch on PyMuPDF, which clips and places PDF regions at true 1:1 scale. Text and cut lines stay vector — never rasterised — with a configurable glue margin and auto paper-saving orientation that reports exactly how many pages it saved.
Pattern-shop conventions
One red dashed assembly rectangle per sheet plus a big column.row number, a pre-slice preview showing the cut grid and overlap bands over the real poster, a tiled logo watermark, and a calibration title page whose 10 cm test square is never rescaled.
One-click Windows installer
Ships as a standalone .exe via Inno Setup — no Python or libraries on the target PC — with a bilingual installer, shortcuts and an uninstaller. A threaded worker keeps the UI responsive with live progress and cancel.
Companion: the Pattern Uploader plugin
Cutting the pattern is only half the job. A WooCommerce plugin uploads dozens of finished PDFs into the right product variations in one operation, matching by slug tokens: a file attaches to a variation if every one of that variation's tokens appears in the filename — with a dry-run preview, idempotent re-runs and paid-only delivery.
Unter der Haube
The matching insight
Products split by both size (XXS…XXL) and height (158/176/182…), so variations form a grid. Guessing where size and height sit in a filename is hopeless across a catalogue — so the variation's own slugs decide, with size spellings canonicalised (xxl ≡ 2xl) on both sides and all/sizes treated as a wildcard axis.
Clean, testable modules
Tiling math, watermark, title generation, the paper catalogue and the batch pipeline are each isolated and independently testable, with the heavy work on a background QThread. The plugin is ~1,300 lines across six focused classes, its matching core ported from an earlier Python prototype.
Wie es lief
Broken Go/Fyne app
Buggy output and a rough UI — the decision was made to rewrite from scratch rather than patch.
Core rewrite
Tiling engine on PyMuPDF + PySide6, watermark, title pages, batch pipeline, preview and cutting-plan report — packaged into a Windows installer.
Iterations & the plugin
An image-compression optimiser, output restyled to real sewing-pattern references, then the Fabrico Pattern Uploader that solved the size×height matching the desktop app had dropped.
Stack & Kanäle
Leistungen dahinter
Das Ergebnis
From a broken Go tool to a shipped two-part suite: cut full-size patterns onto A4, then push them straight into the online store — engine, UI, installer and store integration, built end to end.
Projekt starten
Sagen Sie uns, was fehlt.
Ein Formular, eine echte Antwort binnen 24 Stunden. Oder direkt einen Call buchen.
Weitere Wege zu uns
- E-Mailhello@thnkers.com
- LinkedIn@thnkers
- Call buchencalendly.com/thnkers