As Carole says, I do offer a bit of software for Windows computers for free that is certainly up there with the professional software in terms of capability, though not necessarily interface slickness. To the best of my knowledge it is the only software available that allows you to simply & easily use blended threads and have no limit imposed on the number of colours you can use (on 'Pattern Maker' and PC Stitch there seems to be a built in limit of 240 colours). There are 446 DMC colours, and around 12000 blended colour combinations that are likely to fool the eye into seeing a single colour. In one image, dependant on settings, I was able to provoke a conversion with 7000 colours. With other images and different settings, 4 colours is possible...
Most commercial software I have seen imposes a 999x999 stitch maximum size on the image. My software does not, it leaves you to be as insane as you desire. When doing the conversion, to avoid colour contours dithering is used. You can specify one of 7 dither patterns, and if you don't like the results, you can (uniquely) specify your own dither pattern. When it comes down to it, you have more control over the conversion in my program than any other I know of.
The program comes equipped with 602 symbols built-in and you can add your own font based symbols too.
The program can either print the chart or save it as a PDF file. You can edit the image with an image editor and save the information in a program specific binary file format or as a bitmap with an additional text file. Back stitches are possible, but not half stitches. The program comes with a very basic library of 137 speciality stitches, but it's easy to add your own (in fact all the stitches in the program were added using the built in program tools). Some of the stitches are shown in this program/development thread here:
http://www.crossstitchforum.com/viewtop ... &start=232
I offer the program with a number of alternative thread definition files. The main one to use is the public domain DMC thread definition values found in PC Stitch, Pattern Maker etc. Other thread definition files include Monochrome DMC when you only want a B&W result, Anchor (from my own sampling of Anchor colours), a mixture of DMC and Anchor Blue colours (to expand the slightly limited DMC range of blues). Then, because the standard DMC range seems to give a stitched picture around 11% darker than the input image, I offer a modified DMC thread range, to take this into account. I hope soon[ish] to get my own DMC thread range from scratch based on a floss card I bought last month so that it will truly become 'What you see is what you get'. Then there are other floss ranges, like the Kreink Silk Mori range the Elizabeth Bradley Tapestry wools and for fun, the Lego 2010 brick colours.
To see the program capability, take a look at the program web page here:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/misc/crossstitchplan.html. The program is a free download from that page or via my signature below.
Regards,
Richard