Stitch Era - trouble shooting

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Introduction

Stitch Era embroidery software crashed on me fairly often, but I managed to reduce this. Also stitch generation can fail. The latter problem has a quite easy solution.

Program crashes

• The program may sometimes enter infinite error loops with different types of mistakes: We encountered:
  • Vector our of bounds errors (e.g. the program tries to draw outside its window).
  • Access violations (don't know what kind of library or other program it tries to access)
  • Out of memory errors

In these cases, the program must be killed with the Windows task manager. This happened to us in several situations, but always when moving/resizing stitching or combined stitching/vector objects in the work area.

• After a longer pause, the program will take some time to wake up. This probably will not happen with the commercial product

Therefore:

• Save before moving/resizing operations, although there is an automatic autosave that automatically will open the safe file after a crash.
• You may turn off automatic generate in the generate stitches pull-down menu (lightning button on top in the quick access bar). This will inhibit Stitch Era from generating new stitches after each change you make. Don't forget to manually reprocess all or to turn it back on later.

Process button/menu - turn off automatic generate

• Proceed slowly when editing large and messy designs (e.g. bitmap traced designs)

We also noticed that after a few days of using specific features of the program, errors became very rare. Runtime errors mentioned above may be related to operations an informed user would not do. I also have the feeling that one should wait for operations to finish before engaging the next move, in particular when reshaping stitch sections.

Invalid Main Reference error messages

Sometimes, when you generate the stitches, you will get this message:

Invalid Main Reference - Section Number N.

Locate the "N" stitch section through the object manager or right-click on the message to edit. (Read Stitch Era - interface features for working with a design if you are not familiar with this tool.

A source of trouble are direction lines that are ambiguous, i.e. Stitch Era will not able to figure in which direction to put the stitches.

• Direction points must not sit on top of each other
• Direction lines must not cross

Manual fixing

Here is a picture of a small digitized letter. As you can see, some of the direction lines overlap in the lower part of the W . E.g. one that is close to the cross-hair pointer. Direction lines marked by yellow dots will tell Stitch Era in which direction it has to orient the stitches it will (or did) generate.

Now which direction should the stitch go ? Left or right .... too confusing. To fix that, grab one of the yellow controls at the end of the direction line and drag it away.

Invalid main reference

The picture below shows direction lines that are ok. As you can see, Stitch Era was able to generate the stitches.

Fixed direction lines

After you fixed these, you may have to generate the stitches again, depending on your settings. Hit F9 or the yellow lighting button on top.

It can be tricky to grab this little yellow dot since they may sit at the same spot as dots that define the shape. Zoom in a lot ! You also may read Stitch Era - vector graphics in order to get a feel for node manipulation.

Automatic fixing

If you see a mess like this:

Messy section

Note: The bluish/pink nodes are so-called cut lines that will divide a section and create some sort of subsection. In the picture above the cut lines don't make much sense to me

I rather suggest

• simplifying the area by removing area shape nodes.
• Either manually remove / move stitch directions.
• Or right-click (context menu) and select AutoComplete. This will rebuild direction lines and entry/exit points, but you may loose information, e.g. cut lines will be gone.

Suggestions for improvements

I'll write these down here ....

Vectors

• Smoothing for a single vector (currently one needs to select more than one)
• Smoothing parameters like in vector drawing program. Currently one has to click more than once
• Sort vectors by color
• In vector art, selecting an object should show the selected color in the pull down and side palettes. Currently it's difficult to know what color is selected.
• Color management for vectors. One ought to be able to "add color to palette" in the context menu.
• Photo-Stitch: Be able to embroider color by color for CMY, instead of having to change threads for each section (if there are more than one of course).

Stitch sections

• Remove a single hole