Guide
Embroidery formats are not image formats. Each one stores ordered stitch coordinates plus the jumps, trims, and colour stops the machine needs. This page explains what is inside each format and which machines read it.
An embroidery file is a sequence of machine instructions: move the needle to this coordinate and stitch, jump without stitching, trim the thread, stop for a colour change, end. Coordinates are stored in fixed units — Stichii works in 0.1 mm internally, which is what every one of these binary formats expects.
That is why renaming a PNG to .pes does nothing. There are no stitches in a picture. The artwork has to be digitized into ordered stitch paths first, with density, underlay, and stitch direction decided along the way.
Stichii writes all five major machine formats, and every one is validated against pyembroidery — the reference library also used by Ink/Stitch and other open-source embroidery tools.
DST stores stitches and colour-change stops, but not which colours those are — the operator sets the thread order at the machine. That is a feature in commercial work, where thread assignment belongs to the shop, and a surprise for home users who expect the file to remember.
If you need colours to travel with the file, use PES, JEF, or VP3. Stichii exports the same design to any of them, so you can send DST to a contractor and keep a PES for yourself.
Ready to try it?
Open the editor and digitize your first design in the browser — free to start.