If you use the "Erase" color, the beads tend to have their enclosing oval outline made ragged. This problem does not effect the Pattern Printout, but will be carried through if the pattern is save as a graphic image.

To correct the problem, use the "SWAP" feature, but set both the right and left mouse buttons to the same color. This will cause the program to scan the entire pattern and in the process will re-draw any bead of the selected color. The re-drawing, will fixed the ragged outline.

This must be done for every color bead who's edges are ragged.

When Flipping and Rotating Motifs, in stitches other than Square or Loom, it is difficult to determine exactly what beads you are marking. Since the beads are staggered in the Peyote, 2 Drop Peyote and Brick stitches, there will sometimes be the question of whether you have enough or too little of an outside row of beads marked.

For better, more predictable results, always switch to the Square or Loom stitch before using this feature. Make sure you select the OK Button, before selecting a Flip or Rotate Button, so that if it does not turn out as intended you can then revert back to the way your pattern was by selecting the UnDo Button.

If you are doing very complex shapes, that cannot be easily patched up when reverting back to the original stitch, it would be a good idea to save the design to disk.

When developing the program, it was thought that in calculating the size and shape of beads, high accuracy (three decimal places) was essential. This proved to be incorrect in that the calculations need be no more accurate than the capability of the Computer Monitor being used. The Monitor's capability is in dots (or pixels) per inch and can very from manufacture to manufacture.

The monitor's capability can be expressed as the number of pixels per inch and in most cases is around 96. Since there are, approximately, only around 15 to 20 beads per inch, then the width and height of a bead can be shown at around 6 pixels. Therefore, no more than 1 decimal place need be considered, and that number rounded off to a whole number.

Future software versions and releases will use this approach. Our newest program, "AutoBead," already has been programmed in this way and it is showing good results. In the meantime, in order to get better results when saving your patterns as images, the following steps can be taken to improve the result.

If heavy lines or spaces appear between rows, go to the Design Parameters and increase or decrease the Scale Factor by .01. Repeat the process until there are no heavy lines or spaces showing. It may require several repetitions, depending on the stitch.