Has this ever happened to you ?

This message will be of interest to anyone who has ever used the PC
Stich program. I have PC Stitch and have used it maybe about a half
dozen times over the last few years for transfer of pictures into a
stichable matrix. They usually work wonderfully. Now my current WIP
and it's problem which took me an hour to fix. I have been stitching
away for a couple of months now and would say I am about 60% done or
so. I am working on Black Aida, 18 count and just discovered last
evening that one of the symbols is duplicated. Grrr .... I spent
about an hour this morning with a seam ripper, eyebrow tweezers and my
embroidery scissors ripping out the offening stitches. There were
about 2 dozen highlight stitches scattered over a 3 square inch area
or so, so a 56 by 56 block. Wasn't a big problem, but just an
annoyance because I should have seen this one coming. Even if I
hadn't noticed that the symbols were duplicated, the stitch count
which PC Stitch provides should have clued me in. There was only 1
stitch in the entire picture from one color and 64 due to the other
color. It is fixed now, but my question to any of you out there who
have used PC Stitch at all in your work - have you ever had it
duplicate a symbol and thus cause you unknowingly to use the wrong
color in part of your work ? Julie

koalamom ) writes:
(snip)
It is fixed now, but my question to any of you out there who
have used PC Stitch at all in your work - have you ever had it
duplicate a symbol and thus cause you unknowingly to use the wrong
color in part of your work ? Julie

Not with PC stitch, but I have, sort of, with Pattern Maker. The
symbols I confused are very slightly different, each is a square with a
diagonal going between the same two corners. They are slightly different
sizes, and in one of them the diagonal does not quite go into the corner.
There are several other confusing stitches, but I have not run across any
this bad. I now check each pattern for confusing symbols. I know I can
change them, but I have a different solution. When I come to them, I pull
them up on the computer, and check which one is which. It takes a little
time, but saves a lot of frogging.
--
Jim Cripwell.
The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of one's life, any
time that is spent in stitching.
Adapted from a sign on The Cobb, Lyme Regis, England.

I think if you look very very closely, you will find that the symbol
really is a different symbol.
For example, although they may look the same, a "-" (hyphen-minus) and
a "*" (soft hyphen) are two different keyboard codes.
To the best of my knowledge PC Stitch eliminates look alike symbols
from their usable set of symbols.
However, there are many symbols that are very very close in
appearance, but placed differently in the pattern block.
For example using vertical line type letters - i I l 1 ! ¡ | Ì Í Î Ï ì
í î ï - depending upon what printing font you print your chart with,
if you use arial for example, there is little to no difference in all
of those characters. Some font's do not contain the whole character
set and substitute or print empty blocks or nothing.

It can be annoying cleaning up the selected symbols before printing.
But it beats the alternative hands down, square blocks of various
patterns of dots. sheeeee.

TTUL
Gary