Convert SVG to DST (Tajima) Online

Open an SVG and you find geometry: coordinates, curves, fill rules. Open a DST and you find something else entirely, a sequence of relative needle movements encoded three bytes at a time, plus jump and colour-change commands. Nothing in a DST describes a shape. It describes a route.

That is why the conversion is not an export in the usual sense. Something has to look at each closed region and decide how to cover it with thread: at what angle, how far apart, in which order, and where to travel between regions without leaving a visible jump. Those decisions are the conversion.

The encoding itself is unusual enough to be worth a line: each movement is stored in balanced ternary, where the weights 1, 3, 9, 27 and 81 can each be added or subtracted, so a step of 7 is written as 9 minus 3 plus 1. Get that wrong and every stitch comes out slightly short, which is the kind of bug that produces a design that looks right on screen and stitches visibly small.

DST comes from Tajima, the Japanese manufacturer whose machines dominate commercial embroidery. Its reach now goes far past Tajima hardware: Barudan, ZSK, Ricoma, Happy and most commercial multi-heads read DST, and contract embroiderers ask for it by default because it is the one format they can be confident of opening.

The trade-off is that DST is old and deliberately minimal. It carries stitches and colour stops and nothing else, no thread names, no design metadata, no hoop information. That minimalism is exactly why it travels so well between machines from different makers, and it is why a DST arriving without colours is not a fault.

If you are running a Brother or Babylock machine, PES carries a thread palette and will show you colours on the screen. On a Janome, Elna or Kenmore, use JEF. The stitches themselves are generated the same way in all three.

The file is built to fit the hoop, before a single stitch exists. This is the part automatic converters normally get wrong, and it decides whether what you download is usable at all. The geometry is scaled to the machine field first, and only then are stitches generated on the final shape — so row spacing and stitch length land at their true millimetre values and the density is right by construction. The alternative, which is what you get from a stitch file resized after it was written, multiplies the stitch length and the row spacing by the same factor. That 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 caller can skip it.

Unless you ask for something else, the target is the 4x4 in field (100 x 100 mm) — the Brother SE600, SE700 and PE535 family, by far the largest installed base — with 5 mm of clearance kept on every side, because the stated hoop size overstates the sewable field. A design fitted to 4x4 sews on every machine in the table; one fitted to 5x7 already excludes most of them.

And when the design cannot be stitched, no file is produced and you are not charged. If the short side would land under 5 mm, nothing inside it survives: satin degenerates into a running stitch, lettering closes up, and the fill silently drops the thin spans. Handing you a correctly-hooped file whose content has been erased is the worse failure, so the converter refuses instead — and says so properly: 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 together with a warning that fine detail may not read once sewn. The stitched size, in millimetres and inches, is shown on this page before you pay.

What this conversion does not do. It produces running stitches along strokes, zigzag scanline fills inside closed regions, and an underlay beneath those fills. It does not produce variable-width satin columns, and it applies no pull compensation and no per-region density tuning. On fine lettering or a narrow border, a professional digitiser will beat it. If the finish matters more than the wait, refine the file in dedicated software.

Where this is genuinely useful: a customer sends a logo, it is flat, it is going on a cap or a left chest, and you need it stitching this afternoon rather than tomorrow. Where it is not: a design where the satin work is the job.

If the artwork you have is a JPG or a PNG rather than a vector, convert it to clean paths first with PNG to SVG, then come back here. Stitch generation reads geometry, so anything ragged in the vector becomes ragged in thread. And if what you are weighing up is whether to digitise in house at all, digitizing is not vectorizing sets out where the line falls.