Stitch Era - trouble shooting

The educational technology and digital learning wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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

Since we wrote this section, time went by and the product has improved, but most programs can crash and we still strongly encourage users to turn off automatic generate since it puts a lot of strain on your PC's processing units. 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). For these, the system usually recovers.
  • Out of memory errors

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

Therefore:

  • Save before moving/resizing operations in complex drawings, although there is an automatic autosave that automatically will open the saved file after a crash.
  • I strongly suggest to 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 (CTRL-F9), or process the current object (F9) or to turn it back on later.
Process button/menu - turn off automatic generate

Good vs. bad geometry

When you digitize complex "dirty bitmaps" you often may produce so-called incorrect geometry. Stitch Era only can handle polygons, i.e. areas that have a cleanly defined border and/or cleanly defined holes. Stitch sections that do not comply will have to be fixed manually.

The following picture (made with Illustrator) shows a bad geometry, i.e. there is an area (underneath the black cursor) where border lines cross.

Drawing showing bad geometry

Bad geometry is not easy to produce on purpose:

  • When you use the drawing tools, e.g. the Freehand tool, Stitch Era will not allow you to produce incorrect geometry.
  • Also, if you import an Illustrator graphic, the result will be fixed.
Bad geometry fixed. The area underneath the pointer is gone. Holes are ok

It's really just output from auto-digitalization that can go wrong. If that happens, you will have to untangle manually, you also can try simplification. To to so, select the vector plus another one (this can't be helped) and then Combing vectors (ribbon panel on top) and select Trim shapes

An other type of bad geometry concern overlapping direction lines, see the section below.

Invalid Main Reference and Missing direction line error messages

Sometimes, when you generate the stitches, you will get one or both of these messages:

Invalid Main Reference - Section Number N.
Error: Missing Direction Line. 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.

Direction lines that are ambiguous mean trouble, 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.

Extra tips:

  • 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.
  • Shape nodes can be sneaky. On can hide on top of another one or underneath a direction line. Make sure to find and kill these in your vector graphics, else the stitch section and the stitches generators may become confused.
  • Also (unless you put them there for a reason), you should remove small holes. There is no way to remove individual holes. The only way (I figured out) to do this is to paint a patch of the same color on top and then Combine vectors->Add.

Automatic fixing

If you see a mess like this, it must be fixed.

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

Instead of repairing all the stitch directions, I rather suggest:

  • Simplifying the area by removing area shape nodes or using automatic trim through the combine vectors menu.
  • Then you could manually remove / move stitch directions.... but there is faster.
  • 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.

Can't see the stitches

There might be three issues

  • Stitches are hidden from view: Tick the show stitches icon (CTRL-F2)
  • Stitches are not yet generated: Click CTRL-F9 or press the lightning button
  • Direction lines are bad (see above)

Suggestions for improvements of the Stitch Era software

I'll write these down here ....

Vectors
  • Trimming (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 in order to strengthen the smoothing. Also, there is no aggressive smoothing as in the vectorizing tool.
  • 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. Other suggestion: Display some vector properties in the object inspector.
  • Color management for vectors. One ought to be able to "add color to palette" in the context menu. Don't know since there are few numbers, but there must be a way
  • There should vector color palettes for each major thread make (would be *much* easier)
  • Be able to remove a single hole
Stitch sections
  • 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 photo-stitch sections one of course).