Hi, I have been using Valentina for a few months, and I am not sure to have understood the difference between Valentina and Seamly2D; does Seamly2D replaces Valentina ? Thank you for making it clear to me. Jeanne
Hi Jeanne,
it is a bit confusing, yes.
As fas as I see it, there first was only Valentina. That program was made open source and people became involved and saw the immense potential it has. Somehow there were differences in how the further development should be, what features are useful and so on. And so about last summer the group of developers split - there are two forks now, based on the same program but probably developing into different directions.
This here is the Seamly2D-branch. As the split is still kind of fresh the two programs aren’t to different at the moment and so it is possible that we can help the users of Valentina, too. Also the webpages still have the Valentina in the name. Confusing, I know, but grown historically and not easy to change fast. As the Seamly2D-fork hat a lot of reconstruction of the program to do, as far as I see, there was a time after the split that the program still was named Valentina and there was no “real” Seamly2D-Version, but there is one out now; I am working with it. I only do not know whether it is considered as stable and linked on the webpage already.
There is the other branch, it has kept the name Valentina. There exists a webpage and a forum.
But no matter what, as far as I can help I don’t mind if you use Valentina or Seamly2D. As I am using Seamly2D and at the moment don’t have a working second OS on my PC, there might be questions regarding Valentina I cannot answer in future, also I only can write my tutorials for Seamly2D because I cannot do screenshots and such for the other fork.
Regarding your question
Well, kind of 
Valentina still exists and it is afaik worked on, Seamly2D is based on Valentina 0.5 and will be developed, too, so yes, on one hand it replaces the old Valentina, but on the other hand in future it will be just a different choice to make patterns on a PC.
3 Likes
Thank you so much for such a complete answer. Picholine
1 Like
I have been away for a while and still trying to figure out what I have missed but I did find this article that seems to explain a lot of it from an outside perspective.
http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/valentina-seamly2d
And thanks to the gods for the name change, I loathed Librefashion 
Eventually, i believe the goal is to have Seamly2D completely replace Valentina but it is in its transition period. Once all of the existing stuff is rebranded, it should branch out into more new and excited features.
1 Like
I think it would be more correct to say that a fork in the road was reached and the program split into 2 separate programs. Work and advances on both Seamly2D and Valentina continue as individual programs.
It is a personal choice which program you wish to use. There are 2 things that decided the matter for me:
- The friendly forum that doesn’t mind replying to AGAIN to questions asked before by others, and;
- The big carrot that Seamly2D will eventually transform into Seamly3D.
I hope this helps 
1 Like
True, I was just referring to the confusion of the Seamly fork I think. too many things that still say Valentina on the seamly fork that adds to the wtf factor. Again, i have been out of the loop for a while so i’m not sure what’s going on back end wise, but I would think the forum and everything should be migrated to seamly branded url’s. Even blind forwards or something…Especially if Roman is going forward on his fork keeping Valentina as it’s name.
1 Like
@ladysinaz, I had not seen that particular article about the split, but I agree that it provides a useful perspective of what I saw. I stumbled across the Valentina project about a year ago and really did not intend to get involved in any conflict. I was selfishly looking for free tools to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish as a volunteer costume creator.
I believe the migration to all seamly branded URLs will happen, and that it will just take more time than one might wish. Even in my experience in the world of PAID software development, the great divide between the worldview of a programmer and a marketing/PR person is wide. Both are important.
I got involved simply because I was looking for a free source of patternmaking software. It is easy to get impatient with VOLUNTEERS who do not do things on my desired schedule and I find it useful to remember that they are indeed VOLUNTEERS.
My view is that Roman and Susan are both good people with widely divergent focus and priorities. And it is important to remember that “Valentina” is the name of Roman’s mother, and that was Susan’s motivation for abandoning the name for him to use going forward. Branding and re-branding is a very time and resource intensive activity and I hope it will happen sooner rather than later.
2 Likes
If Susan is willing, I’m more than happy to help with the name switchover. The issue with that is she doesn’t know me other than a few posts on here and i’d have to be given some pretty deep access. Even the Facebook page is still named Valentina. That is an easy fix without affecting current users or content. It’s confusing for people that know whats going on. New users must be completely lost lol
do you know if the folder naming structure is the same in Seamly and Valentina? Like when i look at my PC i go under \users\myname\valentina\ and there are 4 folders patterns, measurements,layouts and templates. If I look in the Seamly2D folder i’m not seeing those 4 folders. Should I just be able to copy/paste from Valentina folder to the seamly2D one without everything going to hell in a handbag?
@ladysinaz I suggest that you start a new topic in the category “developer” and discuss this with @slspencer
Yes… and no. Up to the point at which the programs forked they are identical and you won’t have a problem opening a pattern file in either or. If you try to open a Valentina file since the split it will not open in Seamly2D as there have been additional features added to the schema. On the other hand since nothing has been added to Seamly since to change the schema, you can still open Seamly pattern files in Valentina.
I should also note that this might also apply to the measurement and label files as well as… haven’t really kept track of whether those schemas have changed as well.
3 Likes
@Douglas, it looks like the installation for seamly2d isn’t creating the folder structure. Could you create that issue on github?
Sorry for the slow response… been quite busy @work.
Anyhow, I checked and there is no issue with the Seamly2D installation in regards to folder structure. The paths… that is the folders for the pattern, measurements, layouts, and label files are created when you set them in the application preferences. It should be noted that you can either set the path to where Valentina files are stored, duplicate them in a users/seamly2d folder… or create any named path you want. What I posted previously still holds… you will not be able to open files created in Valentina (shortly) after the fork in Seamly2d, but you can the other way around.
It should be noted that there will be a major conflict though once any new feature is added to Seamly2d requiring a new schema version… currently the pattern schema ver is 6.0… if a new feature is added to Seamly2d requiring a 6.1 schema file, it will conflict with Valentina’s 6.1 schema. The way the programs validate the XML files there would be no way to tell the two apart… the program simply looks at the pattern, label or measurement ver and if it’s later than the program can read it won’t open it. That’s a problem though if the programs have different features for a given readable file. It’s why I brought up the fact the file ext should be changed. Either that, or a new element could be added to the Seamly2D schema so that could be used when opening a file to identify it as a Seamly val or vit.
1 Like
The next version of the Seamly2D schema could (should) declare an XML namespace - I’m happy to help design this change. The code could then easily differentiate between Seamly2D and Valentina files.
3 Likes
would it also not be a good idea to change the file extensions? like from .val to .s2d or something?
3 Likes
Yes there’s a lot more to be done under the hood with our software. Roman did his best to keep everyone out of the technical decisions. As he now says, he was only writing this software to please himself and it’s not his problem if other people don’t like it, but he’s happy to accept everyone’s volunteer work. So now that I’m looking into the technical implementation there are some very big problems with the file format. For example, several element names conflict with HTML, which is why we can’t upload .val files to the wiki.
When we overhaul the file format, we’ll give it a new extension.
4 Likes
ah… good times 
1 Like
As well as some that make no sense… like using “hairline” to indicate a solid or continuous line. In graphic terms - hairline refers to a pen line’s width, not the type of line. Another is the use of “passmark”… there is NO SUCH word as passmark in English (and pattern making) - the correct word is “notch.” I find this one particularity amusing as so much effort is put into translations, and yet there seems little attention to the correct use of English.
As as I have already experienced it’s not a simple task to just change the element name(s) as the proram needs to remain compatible with existing pattern files. So now you end up with excess code to handle and convert names.
1 Like
A small thing that I noticed in SeamlyMe is that the word “tape”, in the descriptions of how the measurements are taken (in English), has also been changed to “seamlyme”. I guess this happened during the “find and replace” with the name changes, but it will need to be corrected for the new users.