Putting a chart in your pattern PDF
You have written the pattern and you want to add the diagram. This is the part nobody documents: what belongs in the symbol key, how to state your terminology, what file format survives printing, and the checks that stop a chart shipping wrong.
What a publishable chart needs
Four things, and readers will forgive almost anything else:
- A symbol key. Every symbol used in the chart, named. Craft Yarn Council's set is standard rather than universal — single crochet is drawn as a plus by some publishers and an × by others, and specialty stitches vary much more than that. Your key is what makes your chart unambiguous.
- A terminology line. One sentence: "Written in US terms." It costs nothing and it prevents the single most common support question in crochet.
- Round or row numbers. Printed beside the first stitch of each round or row, on the side that round begins. Without them, a reader has to count rings from the center.
- A start marker. An arrow, a highlighted first stitch, or a note. Everything else in the chart is guessable; where to begin is not.
Say what a repeat is. If your chart shows one wedge and a "repeat ×8" note rather than the whole motif, say so in words next to the diagram. Readers who have only ever followed written patterns will not assume it.
Vector, not a screenshot
A chart is line art, which means it should go into your PDF as vector artwork — SVG or a vector PDF — not as a PNG or a photograph of graph paper.
- Vector stays sharp at every size, on screen at 400% zoom and on paper at 600 dpi. A screenshot that looks fine in your document is visibly soft when a reader prints it.
- Vector keeps its line weight. Scaling a bitmap chart down turns thin strokes into grey mush; scaling vector down keeps them crisp.
- Vector is smaller. A full-page symbol chart is a few tens of kilobytes as SVG and can be several megabytes as a high-resolution image — which matters when a marketplace caps your upload size.
If you must use a raster image — some layout tools still handle SVG badly — export at least 300 dpi at the final printed size, and never resize it up afterward.
Getting it into your layout tool
- Canva, Affinity Publisher, InDesign, Illustrator, Inkscape: place the SVG directly.
- Google Docs: no SVG support. Place the vector PDF, or a 300 dpi PNG at final size.
- Microsoft Word: insert the SVG as a picture; Word rasterizes on export, so check the exported PDF at 400% zoom before you publish.
- Anything else: export the finished PDF, zoom to 400%, and look at a slash on a double crochet. If it has soft edges, the chart was rasterized somewhere in the chain.
Size and placement
Charts are read while crocheting, at arm's length, often on paper. Give them room.
- Print the chart at a size where a double crochet post is about 7 mm tall. Much smaller and the slashes stop being countable, which is the one thing a reader needs from the symbol.
- Give a large motif its own page, in portrait, with the key on the same page. A chart that forces the reader to flip back and forth for the key is a chart they will stop using.
- Keep the guide rings out of the published version unless they carry the round numbers. They are a drawing aid; in a finished pattern they read as clutter.
- Do not put a chart in the gutter of a two-page spread if the pattern might be printed and bound.
The checks before you publish
- Count one round against your written stitch count. If the chart and the text disagree, one of them is wrong, and you would rather find out now.
- Check every symbol in the chart is in the key, and that nothing is in the key that is not in the chart.
- Print it. On actual paper, in black and white, at the size a reader will use. Grey guide lines that looked subtle on screen sometimes vanish entirely.
- Zoom the exported PDF to 400% and confirm the lines are still crisp.
- Have someone crochet round 1 from the chart alone. The fastest way to find out that your start marker is not where you thought it was.
Licensing: it is your chart
Charts you draw here are yours outright — free exports included. Sell them, publish them, put them in pattern PDFs, print them in a book; no attribution and no royalty. The full wording is in the terms.
Worth being clear about the reverse case too: a chart you trace from someone else's published pattern is a derivative of their pattern, and redrawing it in different software does not change that. Chart your own designs.
Drawing the chart
If you do not already have one, the chart editor is free, runs in the browser and exports both SVG and true-vector PDF at real physical size. In-the-round charts get numbered guide rings and symbols that rotate outward; a repeating motif is charted one wedge at a time and repeated around the center. The wedge-and-repeat method is the workflow.
Common questions
What format should a crochet chart be in a pattern PDF?
Vector — SVG placed into your layout tool, or a vector PDF. Charts are line art, so vector keeps every stroke sharp on screen at any zoom and on paper at any print resolution, and the file is far smaller than a high-resolution image. If your tool cannot place vector, export a PNG at 300 dpi at final printed size and never scale it up.
What should a crochet chart key include?
Every symbol that appears in the chart, with its name; a line stating whether the pattern uses US or UK terms; the round or row numbers; and a marker showing where to start. If the chart shows one repeat rather than the whole motif, say so in words beside it.
How big should a crochet chart be printed?
Large enough that a double crochet post is roughly 7 mm tall on paper. Below that the diagonal slashes that distinguish double crochet from treble stop being countable, which is the main thing a reader needs from the symbol. A full motif usually deserves its own portrait page with the key on it.
Can I sell patterns containing charts I made in Stitch Chart Studio?
Yes. Charts you draw are yours outright, including free-tier exports — sell them, publish them, print them, with no attribution required and no royalty. The one thing you may not do is resell the editor itself.
Do I need to say whether my pattern uses US or UK terms?
Yes, and one sentence does it. Several abbreviations exist in both systems and mean different stitches — dc most damagingly — so a pattern without a terminology line is genuinely ambiguous to half its readers. A chart helps, since the symbols are the same either way, but state it anyway.