The People List of home pages constructed by other cross stitchers. Lots of information and resources,plus links to sites with information about cross stitch events and activities
The Designers List of designers who have created
home pages. Here you can view existing charts and often get a preview of
upcoming releases.
The Stores A growing list of stores, catalogs and other places that sell cross stitch supplies, charts, kits and magazines.
The Software A list of software. You'll find descriptions of various programs.
Magazines and other publication A list of contacts for cross stitch magazines and publications.
RCTN Cookbook This is the offical place to find favorite recipes from RCTN.
PCX2CCS
Visit the ASP Web Site
This is a detailed description of PCX2CCS for Windows Version 2.0. It is available so that you can get a feeling for the programs' capabilities before downloading the program. Click here to see some screenshots
If you have questions about the capabilities that you want answered before you download, drop me an E-mail, or post a message in either the CRAFTS forum on CompuServe or Textile Arts Forum on Delphi (which is a free web-based forum). I'll get back to you.
The purpose of this program is to take a PCX, and generate a counted cross stitch chart. It requires an IBM or compatible. The Windows version requires Windows 3.1 or Window 95. The default setup of PCX2CCS is a maximum image size of 640x480. The maximum image size can be changed. The largest possible image size is dependent on the amount of free memory.
When PCX2CCS loads a PCX image each of the pixel colors will be translated into a symbol. Regardless of the maximum number of colors the monitor can support, PCX2CCS can handle 256 different symbols.If you are loading a24-bit PCX image, the program will do a color reduction to reducd the number of colors down to 256.
There are 2 different display modes: a grid of symbols and an image viewer mode. Each individual grid square represents 1 stitch/pixel. The borders of the image are represented by a thick black line. Every 10th line, both vertical and horizontal are dashed. You can view the grid as either symbols, colored squares or stitches. For the rest of the docuement, "symbols" implies any of the 3 modes. In addition to whole stitch You can also have 1/2 stitches, 3/4 stitches and1/4 stitches. You can have up to 4 stitches in a square.
The image viewer mode display the image, as a PCX viewer, without the grid lines. The image can be scrolled up/down and left/right, as required.
Using the mouse/keyboard, individual symbols can be added or deleted to the grid. Using the EDIT menu, ALL occurances of a symbol can be delete, replaced with another symbol, and ALL blank squares can be filled. There is also a cut & paste option allows areas of the image to the deleted, copied and/or moved. When pasting you can paste either using a transparent or opaque algorithm. You can also paste images from other Windows applications.
The size of the image can be changed. Rows and/or columns can be added to the edge of the image, inserted into the the image, or deleted from the image. The image can also by "clipped" by moving the borders of the image, and deleting all symbols past the new borders.
The image can also manipulated to fit a different size. The program will automatically adjust the image to fit. A preview of the new image will be given, and the new size can be saved to a file, or printed, without changing the currently loaded image.
It is possible to SCALE the image. The scaling is controlled by specifing the ratio(s) to increase (1:many) or decrease (many:1) the height and/or width of the image. The height can be scaled independently of the width. You cannot SCALE image greater than the maximum image size. In addition to, and in conjunction with, scaling, it is possible to specify the desired height and/or width. Thus an image originally 100x100 can be changed to 250x200 by specifing the new dimensions.
You can create a chart of either the entire original image, the entire re-sized or scaled image or select a section of the original to print.
There is also a LIBRARY utility. You can set up a library and load it with "elements" to be incorporated into the image. You can create as many libraries as you want and load them with as many elements as you want. NOTE: REGISTERED USERS WILL RECIEVE A LIBRARY OF ABC's and 123's.
This version has the ability to assign DMC names and numbers to the different symbols. I have taken a unique approach to DMC. Since the program reads PCX images, there are millions possible colors that could be used. Rather than select 360 of these colors, I wrote a program (available to registered users) that allows YOU to associated palette colors with DMC colors. All 360 DMC colors have been mapped.The non-registered version does NOT show the names, only the color numbers. The registered version shows the names too. Registered users also get plus the program to allow them to re-map colors, add more colors and create their own DMC files. Within the program, the DMC assignment can be changed. Since there are do many RGB combinations, and so relatively few DMC colors, it is possible to have the same DMC colors assigned to different symbols. There is a MERGE DUPLICATE function that will merge all symbols that are assigned the same DMC color into 1 symbol.
In addition, when you provide the number of strands of floss that will be used when stitching, the program will calculate the number of skeins of floss required for each symbol.
PCX2CCS also has symbol reduction capabilities. There are 3 dithering algorithms in the Windows version. The total number of symbols can be set to 128, 64, 32, 16 or 8.
This program is distributed as shareware.
Questions and comments are more than welcome email me