The Plaid Studio / Weaving software / WIF
What is a WIF file?
WIF — Weaving Information File — is the plain-text format weaving programs and computer-assisted looms use to exchange a draft. It holds the threading, the tie-up, the treadling and the colour of every thread, which is everything needed to weave the cloth again.
What is inside one
A WIF is an INI-style text file: sections in square brackets, one key per line. You can open it in any text editor and read it. The parts that matter:
- ThreadingWhich shaft each warp end is threaded through, end by end
- Tie-upWhich shafts each treadle lifts
- TreadlingWhich treadle is pressed for each pick, in order
- Colour tableThe colours used, and which one each end and each pick is
- Warp and weftHow many ends and picks, and their defaults
Those four together are a draft: the threading and tie-up describe how the loom is set up, the treadling describes what the weaver does, and the colours describe what it looks like. A drawdown — the picture of the woven cloth — can be computed from them, which is why a WIF is a description of cloth rather than a picture of it.
How to open a WIF file
- Weaving software. Fiberworks, WeavePoint, iWeaveIt, pyweaving and others read and write WIF; it exists precisely so they can hand drafts to each other.
- A dobby loom. Computer-assisted dobby looms take a draft this way, which is the practical reason to export one.
- A text editor. It is plain text. Opening it will tell you at a glance how many shafts and treadles it wants, and how long the draft is.
What a WIF is not: an image. There is no picture in the file. A program has to compute the drawdown from the threading, tie-up and treadling — so two programs can render the same WIF slightly differently, and none of them can show it without doing that work.
Getting a WIF out of a thread count
This is the part that is usually manual. Write a sett as a thread count, choose a structure, and the studio derives the draft from the drawdown itself — the threading, the tie-up, the treadling and every thread's colour — and writes WIF 1.1. The output has been read back with an independent reader (pyweaving) to confirm the draft in the file is the cloth on screen.
Two things worth knowing before you export:
- A block weave can need more shafts than your loom has. The studio names the number it needs, and says when a simpler weave on the stripes would bring it down under twenty-four.
- The WIF describes the cloth, not its printed size. If what you need is a physical reference — one repeat at exact centimetre scale — that is the A4 CAD sheet, and it is a separate export.