Embroidery software

See also

• Embroidery software
• Embroidery glossary
• Concepts of computerized embroidery
• Embroidery and sewing needle
• Embroidery stitch type
• Hooping and stabilizing in computerized embroidery
• Embroider on socks
• Embroidery patch
• Computerized embroidery in education
• Conference embroidery
• Hotfix stone

• Quality: to improve

Introduction

Franz Xaver Simm: Die Stickerin Oil on canvas, 94 x 68 cm

Typical embroidery software allows to create embroidery design files that define parametrized embroidery objects such as lines, sating columns or fill areas. These objects can be created directly through technical drawing or be translated (digitized) from vector drawings. From embroidery objects one can generated stitches that then can be exported to proprietary machine (stitch) formats that can uploaded to an embroidery machine.

Roughly speaking, we can distinguish between several types of software, although sometimes the frontiers are blurred, so you also can consider the following as list of modules that your software should have.

• Software to create designs for "manual" embroidery
• Vectorizers can translate a bitmap image to vector formats. Vectorizers can be found in typical general purpose drawing software like Illustrator or Inkscape, but also in embroidery software.
• Digitizers can translate a vector format to a stitch section representations or directly to stitches (not desirable). It usually also includes a vectorizer. Some digitizers work automatically (or almost) for both raster and vector images, others give a lot of control to the user. Most offer both possibilities.
• Viewers allow to view files, useful for script generated formats for example)
• Transformers can resize, rotate, (sometimes) change colors, i.e. do some lightweight global editing
• Converters can convert from one format to another. They usually include a viewer and can do transformations.
• Editors can draw designs in bother vector and embroidery object (stitch section format. Design parts are often first drawn in some ordinary vector format since it allow for easy manipulation. These then must be digitized. Editors then allow for direct drawing of higher-level embroidery objects that can be be parametrized, e.g. with a pattern. Finally, editors also should allow to edit individual stitches (for fine tuning).
• Lettering programs include optimized "stitch" fonts. If you just use a digitizer to translate letters from a vector file you likely will get bad results, since the filling algorithm is not optimized for lettering.
• Organizers help to organize designs on your hard disk.
• Complete embroidery CAD Suites, support all the design stages. Often, the drawing module is based on existing high-end vector graphics software. E.g. Pulse's embroideryi2 is an add-on for either Illustrator or Corel Draw. Bernina's Embroidery software is based on Corel. High-end embroidery software suites should include all of the software types listed above.
• Software libraries to create embroidery software or designs through coding.
• Specialized embroidery programming languages to create designs through coding.

State of the software industry

Now a subjective (personal) opinion about the embroidery software market: It is very difficult to find out what software costs and - this is funny - where and how to buy. Some companies (like Bernina) seem to sell only through authorized resellers. Other companies have snotty sales people. E.g. email support from Wilcom wouldn't give a person from university of Geneva (who runs this wiki) the name of a Swiss dealer and even were implying that we were not smart enough learning their entry-level professional tool and showing our students how it works. Probably these guys never encountered any other drawing software or they might have a different idea of what "difficult" could mean. We regret to say so, but learning basic use of advanced embroidery software is easy for a technical person and takes no more than two weeks full time. Producing professional embroidery designs is more difficult and may take at least 7 years (but so does professional cooking, car racing or web page design ...)

Anyhow, we found out that most high-end consumer software is in the $1500 to $2000 range. Entry-level professional software also starts around $2000. I can understand that professional software costs $10'000 or more, but I have trouble understanding why what I consider mid-level prosumer software costs over $2000 since selling it cheaper probably would entice many more people to buy it. That being said, I do have the money to purchase, but I won't buy anything for which technical documentation can't be found (more about that a few lines down...). At least some companies, e.g. Sierra, offer extremely nice conditions to education.

I also noticed that too many embroidery websites do have HTML/JavaScript coding errors, e.g. some pages won't display on modern browsers. Not a good sign! Incompatibility and lagging behind technology is another problem. Often (according to forum complaints) does embroidery software have problems running under recent Windows versions. Some websites for high-end prosumer software (e.g. Bernina's and Wilcom's) seem to be well-made but do not provide any real feature list. On the opposite, Embird has a fairly ugly website, but it's fast, fully functional and even includes useful information. One could relate this site's web design philosophy to the facts that Embird software probably offers the best price/performance ratio besides (Stitch Era from Sierra) and that it is probably the most popular software suite for embroidery.

Most software includes machine-specific features. On older machines, one has to pay attention to connectivity. Some machine types use specially formatted memory cards or USB sticks (or some other weird specifics) and do require special software to write CNC files. Usually this type of software is offered for free (either when you buy the machine or for download). The same software then also can convert, resize, rotate and preview. See converting software below. A more "exotic" feature concerns support for jumbo-hoops, i.e. hoops for large designs that don't really fit onto the machine and that must be turned in the middle of the process. The software should allow splitting a design in a correct way and also insert a message to user so that he/she can rotate the hoop.

Important: If you plan buying any sort of design software, you should check if your type/brand is directly supported, i.e. if the software can export a design to model-specific file formats (like *.art, *.jef, *.pes, etc.). If it cannot, you then could use a converter, but this may be a lossy process and you will loose time. I couldn't find any serious information on how well various converters work. Therefore, I suggest finding out what other embroidery software is produced by the company providing the converter. E.g. Wilcom creates software for both Bernina and Janome. Therefore we might hypothesize that their free Truesizer converter program ought to be able to translate an .ART file (output of Bernina V6) to *.JEF (Elna/Janome machine format) without any mistakes.

We couldn't find any up-to-date (Spring 2011) list that includes any sort of serious comparison of embroidery software. The best one we found was Understanding Digitizing Software, made by Floriani (2008) and was just a feature comparison, not a serious evaluation. Add the various numerous obscure file formats and you find yourself in a software jungle that is hard to beat in terms of inaccessibility, obscurity and overblown prices.

Some might argue that there isn't any non-financial reason to buy anything else than brand-specific software since almost every brand does have a more or less high-end consumer design suite. Unfortunately, some brand-specific software can do more that others. E.g. from looking at the sales flyers, Bernina's V6 is much more powerful than Elna's V3 or Janome Pro. The latter do not integrate typical object-oriented vector drawing features if we understood right. For techies, vector graphics is simply a must have feature since we already are used to vector drawing. Of course, importing vector graphics from another program would be an option for experts in embroidery, but it is not for beginners since one has to round trip a lot between various stages of a part design.

In conclusion, in the absence of any serious information on embroidery software, we decided to invest our efforts in the free Stitch Era Universal. We then later bought the Pro "liberty" version. Since July 2013, there is no more free version. However, the formerly free version is now available under a 6-month inexpensive rent program. Retrospectively (fall 2011/fall 2013/winter 2018), we do believe that the Stich Era route is the way to go if you plan to learn with an ambitious state-of-the-art program. The Pro version only has few extra features, and it will load faster. The cheap for rent versions are limited to 12K or 40K stitches (the latter is quite a lot). Education gets very conditions. You only will have to manage vouchers and the fairly long download process.

Free and open source, tools and projects

There exist virtually no totally free design + digitizing tools that are fully functional. As of Spring 2022, there exists only one functional embroidery design software, i.e. Ink/Stitch. In addition there exist software tools that require good programming skills.

Ink/Stitch

• Ink/Stitch: Recommended As of August 2018, the best bet is to work with an Inkscape extension for machine embroidery design by Lex Neva. It allows creating embroidery files from SVG. The only caveat is that you will have to learn how to use Inkscape. This program takes some time to learn, but there are hundreds of tutorials since it is the only full strength free and open vector drawing program. Since InkStitch is fairly new, there are not many tutorials yet, but there are enough to get you going. However, it has 2 major elements going for it. 1) It is the most effective open source project to date. 2) It's still under actual development (as of 2022) with a community around it. Ink/Stitch
  • Read
    InkStitch

(Comment from Tatarize) Though, after authoring pyembroidery I did get a ban for telling Lex Neva that he was "doing it wrong" in reference to his stitch simulator. He took offense at being told he was doing it wrong, and more offense at proving that doing it correctly is very possible, he extended the ban, and spun off his own version of pyembroidery so as to "not have to deal with me". -- Inkstitch, it does have a community around it. But, also the drama involved with that.

KXStitch

A tool for hand embroidery using Linux (!!)

• KXStitch is a program that lets you create cross stitch patterns and charts. Patterns can be created from scratch on a user defined size of grid, which can be enlarged or reduced in size as your pattern progresses. Alternatively you can import images from many graphics file formats which will allow you to reduce the number of colors and to restrict the conversion to full stitches or optionally use fractional stitches. You may also use images as backgrounds allowing you to trace over them. These imported images can then be modified using the supplied tools to produce your final design. Runs under Linux/KDE, a software layer for various linux that requires installation work.
• Project pages with explanations

Other resources:

• As of 2022, the source code can be found at with KDE and mirrored at github
• Old KXStitch project site that include some pictures

Software libraries

• pyembroidery: a python backend for Ink/Stitch to replace libembroidery in that project. It's also a stand-alone project to allow reading and writing of a variety of embroidery formats. (full disclosure, I, Tatarize wrote the code, but it's solid and pretty complete).

• PEEmbroider is a library for the processing programming language, popular in the artist/multimedia community.

Programming languages

• Turtlestitch combines turtle graphics and programming with embroidery within a teaching/learning environment.

• Embroidery Designer (formerly Code’n’Stitch , and extension of Catrobat/Pocket Code allows to program embroidery designs in a visual programming language directly on a smartphone, without any PC or laptop. It is inspired by Scratch and Turtlestitch.

Dead or half-dead open source projects

• Thredworks is a digitizing and drawing program for embroidery machines. One reason to use this program is that this software somehow entices learning how embroidery and stitching works, i.e. although the program works with forms and auto-adapted stitches (as opposed to simple stitches), display and operations are fairly close to stitching level.
  • I installed this software on Win 7 64-bit. The program comes as a small zip archive and only needs to be dezipped in a directory and only includes 4 files, i.e. no installation is needed. Click on thre3.exe to run.
  • Design of the interface looks fairly "old-style", but the program is fully functional and includes many features. It's by no means just a stitch editor with some simple transformations. For example, it can do sophisticated fills of shapes and strokes (borders)! The program also includes a simple bitmap tracer for bmp files.
  • Download the Thred lessons from the download page and go at least through the first 7 lessons in order to create a simple design. Read them all ...
  • As of 2015, last version was released in 2006.
  • A linux version seems to be available, read Embroidery design on Linux now possible with Thred Source code might be here.
  • (aArtline is a free drawing program with good thred integration, the last version of which dates back to 2006. Its homepage aartline.com is now a webpage design demo)

• Embroidermodder. Free software tool originally allowed the user to add custom modifications to embroidery designs (read/write 5-6 formats). Started in 2004 by Mark Pontius, the project is currently led Josh Varga (as of March 2018), after the death of Jonathan Greig who previously shepherded the project with Josh. It had a failed Kickstarter campaign in 2014. The current 1.7 version allows (as before) to edit various types of design files and to create simple designs from scratch. A promised version 2.0 version includes many more features and might make it into a really usable program. But, does not seem to be going anywhere.
  • The 2.0 dev code (needs compiling) is available on Github
  • Compiled code is available from Source Forge
  • A new attempt for crowd funding was made in January 2022: https://embroidermodder.org/
  • LibEmbroidery is one of the side projects of embroidermodder, is libembroidery which is the core reading and writing (converting) ability in a command line interface. And one of the more pronounced contributions to open source software in that the source code long-time served as the only documentation of many of the embroidery formats.

• Madpunch is/was a free program rumored to have similar features as some (earlier?) versions of an Embird suite, i.e. it includes editing, digitizing and lettering. Users have to change a key about every two weeks, probably to bring them to their web site. The site includes video (captivate) tutorials. It installed fine on Win 7 64-bit. Not tested for real. (2011). Website seems to be dead on March 2015.

• SophieSew digitizing and editing of machine embroidery. Written and developed by Carlos Mandel, see his twitter updates. Also include some free designs. Installed and shortly tested on Win 7 (2011) and Win 8 (2015). According to various forum posts, this program was nice and usable, but as of 2022 it is still in alpha stage and may crash or freeze. The current version 1.3 hasn't been updated since 2007.

• Rudolf's Sewing / Embroidery related Programs (last updated 2005, not tested since). Includes a free conversion program and a simple drawing program creating *.pcs.

• SVG2Embroidery Converter. Including six short tutorials to create stitch files in Inkscape. As close to stitch level as it can be (in particular, one needs to manually check that generated patterns have a density close to 4 or 5 stiches / mm).

• Embroidery output extension for Inkscape by Jon Howell, 2010. GPL. Easy to install on Linux, needs Python and the shapely library. Tested on April 2011 under Ubuntu 10.04. To install:

apt-get install python-shapely
cp embroider.inx embroider.py PyEmb.py ~/.config/inkscape/extensions

In Inkscape, the extension is available in Extensions->Render->Embroider

Only works, if you create a drawing with filled regions that are converted to pathes and are not grouped. (So no grouping, no strokes, etc. !)

Result *.exp will sit in your home directory or some other place ...

I managed to create a stitched oval and display it with some *.exp viewer. - April 2011.

• embroidery, an Inkscape extensions by Garfield Kass, based on Jon Howell, 2010 (above)

produces VP2 (Pfaff) files

• Joachims's freeware include Pesview 1.3.0, a Viewer/Conversion-Tool for PES/PEC/PCS/DST/SEW and EasyPEC for converting PES.x to PEC 1.0

• PES-file thumbnailer (pes2png converter) by Linus Thorvald himself ! (for Linux, needs pnglib-devel and cairo-devel to comple) Read Embroidery.. gaah January 13, 2010. To install this under Linux (Unbuntu 10)

apt-get install libcairo-dev
apt-get install libpng-dev
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/pesconvert.git
cd pesconvert
make
cp pesconvert /usr/local/bin

• Embroidery Reader for PES (Brother)
• Planned since 2009: The Brother Liberation Front announced working on and Inkscape and Gimp plugin named Yarnscape (seems dead as of 2015) and Crafty Gimp respectively. If this will happen, then Inkscape could become a free embroidery design tool.

• showjef was a 2009 project by David Boddie to decode .jef files circa 2009.

• pyembroidery not to be confused with inkstitch/pyembroidery was a 2006 project by Jackson Yee to implement a wxPython interface with some reading and writing of .dst files.

Commercial digitizing and design tools

It is difficult to find out who produces the software (as opposed to selling it), how much it costs, and (again) what the software can really do. Some websites are too heavy on useless pictures, light on information and difficult to navigate. In addition, more than one product may be advertised on totally different web sites which is quite confusing. And even when the products claim to be different they can be white labeled version of the same software. I find it interesting that at least three products are based on Corel Draw and I wonder if there is some common code base. Also, many modern programs can at least import from Corel or Illustrator by copy/pasting or some OLE mechanism.

Most sewing/embroidery machine makers sell their own custom software suite. Most of these packages also work with other brands, i.e. they can digitize into more than one format and write to several types of cards or otherwise communicate with a machine.

High-end "prosumers" (advanced home users) software superficially may look quite the same as entry-level professional software, but there seem to be the following differences:

• Prosumer products may have additional features and tools for the home market, i.e. so-called short-cuts and other built-in features that will make design easy.
• Entry-level industrial products may give the designer better control over stitching and control of stitching machines.

Good examples are Bernina embroidery software V6 made for the home market and Wilcom DecoStudio made as entry-level professional tool. Both are made by the same company and both are extensions of Corel Draw. Bernina's software is cheaper, is based on an older and weaker Corel version, but it does support other machine formats than their own. I.e. strictly from looking at specifications, one could qualify it as the advanced home user tool. However, we don't know how it would scale up against cheaper suites like Stitch Era and DrawWings (see above).

Rather cheap general purpose software for the consumer market

• Embird Embroidery Software sells several programs, A base program (Basic Embird) plus several plugins e.g. Embird Studio (required for digitizing). Can read/write many formats and supports many machine types. It comes in several components, e.g.:
  • Basic Embird Embroidery Software (basic editing, sizing, stitch editing, etc.). This $164 program must be acquired for other modules to run.
  • Studio (digitizing, lettering, auto-tracing, freehand, conversion of vector files into embroidery) is $150 (to digitize drawings with a low number of colors, the most common use case) + $90 (optional, to digitize photos) = $240. Demo version cannot save your work.
  • Font engine, $145
  • I.e. for less than $550 one gets a good package and it can be tried out before buying. In addition, the web site has real information (as opposed to fancy PDF files). This program seems to be fairly popular and seems to offer the best price/performance ratio. It's probably as powerful as many high-end consumer design suites.
  • There are many forums with support (google yourself). One example that includes a beginner's tutorial is Clipartopolis

• Embrilliance sells Stitch Artist.
  • Stitch Artist level 3 is a full, relatively cheap digitizing software ($ 650$)

• EmbroideryWare is as of 2018 a new product and very cheap, i.e., $120 ($170 with more fonts) in 2021. It includes digitized lettering and digitizing from drawings. All typical stitch types are supported, including turning fills. This could be best cheap buy for beginners, but so far, we did not test it. It can import SVG files, but only supports lines and beziers. If the file includes other elements (like groups or strokes) the file has to be simplified. Trial version lasts one month...

• SewArt Embroidery Auto-Digitizer by S&S Computing, is “for converting clipart or other forms of raster and vector images into an embroidery file. Image processing tools and a step-by-step wizard are provided to produce an image suitable for yielding a high-quality embroidery stitch-out.” Free 30 day demo, only $75. (Needs the Microsoft C++ 2005 library, also available as download). Tested under Win 7 64bit. I found it very easy to learn the basics (about 30 minutes). I managed to digitize and create a stitch file for a complex photo (including color reduction, pixel reduction, color merging, despeckling, etc.). Of course I can imagine other features it should have, but I like the price/performance ratio. - Daniel K. Schneider May 2011.

• BuzzTools sells a series of design tools, e.g. design management software, Buzz-2-Stitches (digitizer, $300), BuzzEdit (editor, $190), Words to stitches, etc. These tools seem to be fairly popular and are reasonable priced. Trial versions are available.

• Stitch & Sew made by Compucon has several product levels: Designer (Standard Digitizing & Editing package), Editor (Lettering & Editing package), Embroidery Studio (digitizing & editing). The full package is called Embroidery Studio Plus. No idea how much it would cost. Demo versions are available, e.g. from central european distributor (teamhoko). Files are dated 2008. Several vendor links on the stitch & sew site are dead. Some point to local Brother dealers where no information can be found, i.e. Internet presence is messy. In addition to Stitch&Sew, Compucon sells EOS (Embroidery operating system), a high-end software.

• Stitches in Motion has Sew Art (software for converting clip-art or other forms of raster and vector images into an embroidery file). It can output in PES or JEF. For other formats, you will have to use a conversion program.

• ApS-Ethos has several programs. The top-end Virtuoso Plus can edit, letter, digitize, import vector files, etc.