Convert SVG to PES (Brother) Online

The stitches in a PES and in a DST are produced by the same engine here: running stitches along strokes, zigzag scanline fills inside closed regions, underlay beneath the fills. What separates the two formats is what travels alongside those stitches.

DST carries no colour at all. PES wraps a PEC block, which includes a thread list, so the machine can draw the design on its screen in something close to the right colours and tell you which thread to load at each stop. On a domestic or small-shop machine, where you are standing at the panel rather than working from a printed job sheet, that is a real difference in how the job runs.

The colours are indices into Brother’s own palette rather than free RGB values, so what you see is the machine’s nearest match, not your exact artwork colour.

PES is Brother’s format, and it reaches further than the name suggests. Babylock machines are built on shared Brother engineering and read PES natively. Several Bernina models accept it too. In practice, if the machine is not a commercial Tajima-style multi-head, PES is the first format worth trying.

That domestic and small-shop lean shapes what the format is good at. Designs are usually smaller, hoops are more constrained, and the operator is the same person who prepared the file. It also means the honest limits below matter more, not less: there is no digitiser down the corridor to fix a thin satin border.

Janome, Elna and Kenmore machines want JEF instead. Commercial multi-heads want DST.

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.

There is also a stitch-length ceiling in PES, around 12 mm per command, which the writer respects by splitting longer travels. You do not need to do anything about it, but it explains why a long straight run appears as several stitches rather than one.

If your starting point is a photo or a screenshot rather than a vector, run it through PNG to SVG first and check the result before converting to stitches. The fill engine follows the geometry it is given, so a trace full of stray nodes becomes thread full of stray stitches. For the wider question of when a file is genuinely ready to run, see what camera-ready actually means.