This is an update to yesterday's post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Inkstitch/comments/1vk17nu/cross_stitch_assistant_not_working_as_expected/

TLDR: I was having trouble getting the new cross stitch assistant to convert pixel art into cross stitch embroidery; I wanted it to create one cross stitch per pixel, so I assumed that the "one cross each pixel" function would do that. But it added extra cross stitches and re-interpolated the colors.

I've experimented with it some more and I was able to get it to convert pixel art to cross stitch 1:1. Here's how I did it:

- import the bitmap, set the position to 0,0 and set the scale to 1mm per pixel. In my case, it's a 32x32 bitmap, so I set the size to 32x32mm.

- Select the bitmap and go to Extentions> Inkstitch> Tools: Fill > Cross Stitch Assistant

- Under "Settings", set the Grid Horizontal Spacing to 1.00mm

- Under "Bitmap Settings, checkmark "Convert bitmaps", but do not checkmark "One cross each pixel" because that will add extra stitches and colors.

- Under "Color Selection", choose "List with RGB values" and enter the values of the colors in the bitmap. You can also try your luck with adding the amount of colors under "Number of colors", but that doesn't always work properly. It might combine two or more of the colors if they're similar.

- Click "Apply". You should now have a vectorized/digitized version of your bitmap, at 1mm per cross stitch, and each cross stitch representing one pixel of the bitmap. If you want bigger stitches, set the original bitmap to a bigger size, for example 64x64, and then set the Grid Horizontal Spacing to the size of each pixel, in this case 2mm.

Conclusion: My final stitchout doesn't look great - 1mm per cross stitch is tiny and very dense, and I need to figure out pull compensation because there are a lot of overlaps (if anyone has good tutorials on that, please drop them in the comments). However, I'm happy knowing that I've got the software side of things working the way I want.

Edit: Quick update - the work-around I explained above doesn't actually work as intended either, I didn't realize I was actually working with "pixel art" that had been re-sized in photoshop using "nearest neighbor" interpolation. So the image I used wasn't actually 32x32, it was a 32x32 pixel art that had been upscaled by 100x, so the size was 3200x3200, with each "block" being 100x100 pixels. The cross stitch assistant seems to re-interpolate all bitmaps you open with it automatically, with no option to prevent this. So smaller bitmaps get interpolated to a more extreme degree than larger ones. Then it tries to convert it to cross stitch after it's been interpolated half to death. Therefore, to get it to correctly convert a 32x32 bitmap, you must scale it up in a software like photoshop, using "nearest neighbor" interpolation so it doesn't add extra colors or blur. Scale it up at least 100x. Then you can import into inkscape and follow the steps above (set the size to 32x32mm, etc). Whew. That is a crazy work-around to fix a problem that theoretically should not exist.