Formats and loom compatibility
If you are deciding whether Draft can talk to your loom, this is the page to read first. Short answer: anything that accepts a peg plan as text, plus every mechanical dobby, because paper is a format too.
The native file is a text file
A draft is one .flxd file, UTF‑8, one key per line, keys in any order. The format has been stable since the flxd/3 header arrived with version 3.0 in October 2024. It is documented inside the program under Help → File format, and here is a complete four-shaft file:
flxd/3
name Twill sampler, 2/2
author M. Dussart
shafts 4
treadles 4
unit mm
threading 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
tieup 1:1,2 2:2,3 3:3,4 4:4,1
treadling 1 2 3 4
repeat ends 11 picks 40
warp #2c4461 x16
weft #d9c8a4 x8
sett warp 24/10cm weft 20/10cm
reed 4 per dent
float warn 5
Three things follow from this. Drafts live happily in version control, two drafts can be compared with a diff tool, and a file written by a newer Draft still opens in an older one — unknown keys are skipped with a line in the status area rather than a refusal.
What Draft reads
| Source | Ext | Comes across | Does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flaxforge draft | .flxd | Everything in the file | — |
| Pattern exchange, plain | .wpx | Threading, tie-up, treadling, one colour pair | Borders, unit names, reed plan |
| Tab or comma grid | .tsv .csv | Drawdown squares; threading is then solved | Colour, sett |
| Portable bitmap, plain P1 | .pbm | One pixel per square, white is warp up | Anything but the grid |
| Peg plan listing | .pln | Treadling order and the lift table | Threading, which cannot be inferred |
Imports of the last three kinds end in the solver, so expect to be told how many shafts the pattern wants. A 24-shaft advancing twill imported as a grid will not fold itself into your eight-shaft loom, and Draft says that in one line instead of silently dropping ends.
What Draft writes
| Output | Ext | Shape of it |
|---|---|---|
| Flaxforge draft | .flxd | The native file above |
| Pattern exchange, plain | .wpx | For editors that read a plain interchange draft |
| Peg plan | .pln | One line per pick, shaft numbers or a 0/1 column |
| Lift table | .txt | Tab separated, one column per shaft, header optional |
| Threading card | Bands of 100 ends, numbered top and bottom | |
| Drawdown | .svg .pdf | Line weights in millimetres, grid optional |
| Draft tables | .csv | Threading, tie-up and treadling as three blocks |
| Portable bitmap | .pbm | The drawdown at one pixel per square |
Looms and how Draft reaches them
| Loom | Route | Known to work with |
|---|---|---|
| Floor loom, treadles tied by hand | Printed threading card and treadling column | Any |
| Table loom, hand levers | Printed treadling, one pick per line, tick column | Any |
| Mechanical dobby, pegged bars | Printed peg plan, 100 picks per sheet | Any |
| Electronic dobby over a serial line | .pln sent as text, 9600 or 19200 baud, 8‑N‑1, no handshake | 16, 24 and 32‑shaft boxes in our hands |
| Electronic dobby over a USB serial adapter | The same stream through the adapter's device node | Needs the adapter's own driver |
| Parallel solenoid box with a card reader | Lift table written to a stick as .txt | Reported working, not tested here |
We own two dobby looms between us, a 16‑shaft table loom and a 24‑shaft floor loom, and those are the two we can honestly say we test on before a release. Everything else in that column is the word of the weaver who wrote to us, and we will happily add yours.
Shaft numbering, and why it bites
Half the weaving world counts shaft 1 at the front of the loom and half counts it at the back. Draft defaults to the front, draws shaft 1 as the top row of the threading, and offers one switch in Preferences → Loom that flips both the screen and every export at once.
Get it wrong and the cloth still weaves: you simply get the mirror image of your pattern, which is harmless in a twill and obvious in an asymmetric one. The one place it is not harmless is a peg plan sent to a dobby, because a mirrored lift makes the shed open on the wrong side of your floating selvedge. The export dialogue therefore prints the current convention in the preview header rather than hiding it in a settings page.
Builds and requirements
| Platform | Package | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 10 and 11, x86‑64 | Installer, or a zip you can run from a stick | 46 MB |
| macOS 13 and later, arm64 and x86‑64 | Signed disk image, one universal build | 52 MB |
| Linux x86‑64 | AppImage, or a tarball for your own packaging | 44 MB |
| Linux aarch64 | Tarball; built for single-board machines in workshops | 43 MB |
Four gigabytes of memory is plenty and a graphics card is irrelevant — everything is drawn with flat rectangles. The window wants 1100 × 700 pixels before the four regions stop crowding each other, so a 1366‑wide laptop is comfortable and a 1024‑wide netbook is not. Installed size is about 120 MB including the structure library.
Licence keys and prices are on the pricing page; the version history is on the changelog.