Embroidery Vector Converter — Clean SVG Files for Digitizing Software

This converts artwork into clean vector paths that your digitizing software can work from. It is not professional digitizing, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Real digitizing decides stitch type, direction, density, pull compensation and underlay for each shape, based on the fabric and the machine. That is judgement work, and a tracer does not do it. What a good vector does is remove the step where your digitizer spends forty minutes cleaning up a customer JPG before the real work starts.

We are currently paying an independent digitizing house to stitch out three of our machine-generated files on real machines and give us an unvarnished verdict — including whether the underlay holds and whether tight counters close up. When that comes back we will publish what it says, favourable or not. Until then, treat the machine formats here as a starting file, not a finished one.

Every automatic embroidery converter on the market will hand you a file. That is the complaint the trade actually has about them: the file exists, it is binary-valid, and it is unsewable, because the design was sized by whatever the SVG happened to declare and then, at best, shrunk on the machine.

This one decides the size first. The geometry is scaled to the hoop field before a single stitch is generated, so the fill rows and the stitch interval are computed on the final shape and land at their real millimetre values. Density is correct by construction. Scaling a stitch file afterwards multiplies the stitch length and the row spacing by the same factor, which is exactly the "never resize a stitch file by more than 20 percent" rule the trade warns about, and it is why this fit lives inside the encoders where no part of the product can skip it.

The default target is the 4x4 in field (100 x 100 mm), the Brother SE600, SE700 and PE535 size, with 5 mm of clearance kept on every side because a stated hoop size overstates the sewable field. A design fitted to 4x4 sews on every machine in the table.

And when it will not work, no file is produced and you are not charged. Under a 5 mm short side, satin degenerates to a running stitch, lettering closes up, and the fill drops thin spans outright: the file would be correctly hooped and empty of its content. So it is refused, with the size it reached, the hoop it was aiming at, and either the hoop that would hold it or the width to ask for. Between 5 and 10 mm you get the file plus a warning that fine detail may not read once sewn. The stitch count, the number of thread colours and the stitched size in millimetres are all shown on this page before you buy, and they come from the same counter that writes the file rather than from a separate estimate.

Embroidery is less forgiving than print or cutting, because thread has a minimum size and fabric moves.

• Fine detail below about 1.5 mm disappears. A logo with hairline rules or tiny registered-trademark symbols will either stitch as a blob or not at all. This is a physical limit, not a software one.
• Tight counters fill in. The holes in an O, an A or an 8 need enough space for the underlay plus the top stitch. Below a certain size they close.
• Gradients have to become colour blocks. Thread comes in discrete colours. A sunset that looks lovely on screen becomes three or four flat regions, and deciding which three is a design choice somebody has to make.
• Photographic sources are not embroidery sources. If the customer sends a photo of a sign rather than the logo, no amount of processing turns it into stitchable geometry.

The useful move is to find this out at intake, while the customer is still on the phone, rather than after the hoop is loaded.

The single best predictor of how an embroidery job will go is the resolution of what the customer sent. A rough guide, measured on our own corpus:

• Above 1024 px on the short side — the vector will hold, including most lettering.
• 256 to 1024 px — large shapes and heavy type are fine; small text comes back approximate.
• Below 256 px — do not build a quote around it. Ask for the original artwork, or price in a redraw.

A signage firm sent us a logo this month that came back badly, and the reason took one measurement: the file was 150 by 65 pixels, pulled from their own website. At that size the lettering is about six pixels tall. Nothing recovers it. Telling a customer that on day one costs you a phone call; discovering it after digitizing costs you the job.