I am not an expert on Scottish Clans and history, if that is what you are after then please follow this link to Sunsite. If you are interested in the history of your Scottish name then please follow this link to the University of Manchester.
There are more than 280 tartans presented here, listed alphabetically.
Each one has a button as the word "BMP" which
will present an image which is the minimum possible piece of cloth.
Though the first collection of tartans on the Internet appearantly goes to Stephen Watson. My independent collection is more complete, as well as a collection that will allow you to make computer wallpaper. There is another collection on-line which appears to have been created about the same time as mine, by Dick Grune.
Here is the list in 3 parts, A to L, M only, and N to Z.
Newly added ones are also listed here.
Using the minimum image.
The minimum image is a
MS-Windows format BMP graphic file. The intention for this file is that
you can use it to make a background in MS-Windows of your family (or
favourite) tartan.
Download the file (in binary mode), uncompress it,
place it in your MS-Windows directory on your PC, then use the MS-Windows
Control Panel (select Desktop) to select that file as the wallpaper. The
minimum cloth will be tiled to fill your screen.
Potentially you could also use a tartan as a Mozilla extended background for your home page. But since I dislike those backgrounds I'm not going to tell you how.
About the names.
The history of tartans is not as straight forward as one might hope, in fact
there are conflicting records of what tartans look like. I've presented
what I've found to be the most common for each tartan. Then
for different styles the name has appended the source for the variation,
"VS" is the "Vestiarium Scoticum" by J.S.Stuart and C.E.Stuart 1842,
"Logan" is "The Scottish Gael" by James Logan 1831. Consult books on tartans
for more information.
About colors.
Coloring is also not well defined, the descriptions are quite vague.
What I've tried to do is to pick some
colors
that seem reasonable, the
problem is the translation of cloth colors to computer display colors. The
problem is confounded by the particular hardware and software used to
display the images, for instance a standard VGA display is only a palette
of 16 colors.
Known problems.
About the production of these images.
I've collected cloth descriptions (and done thread counts too) of how
tartans should look, then used a program to weave the "cloth" in memory
then converted the image to a graphic file.
Statistics on the threads.
The programs are of course written in
Modula-2.
Thoughts and questions
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Dr. J. MacPherson for some basic information. Thanks to
M.Williams and to
Dr. K. Nilsen for encouragement.
I also get lots of comments from all
over the world.
And of course thanks to my family for putting up with me while I played with
all this stuff.
About me
I'm not of
Scottish decent, but I am from
"New Scotland" and there
are lots of kilts here in
Antigonish, its just
that I like computer graphics.
Related Celtic Links