Format guide

StitchKit reads and writes seven formats. Pick the right one for your machine.

Tajima DST

Industry standard for commercial machines. 3-byte stitch records, 6-color built-in palette, 512-byte ASCII header.

Brother PES

Most consumer brands (Brother, Babylock). Variable-length 7-bit / 12-bit deltas with embedded PEC.

Melco EXP

Commercial Melco machines. Simple delta encoding, commonly used in pro digitizing pipelines.

Janome JEF

Janome consumer + commercial. Supports color count, design dimensions, hoop size.

Husqvarna Viking VP3

Designer / Diamond series. Includes thread color metadata and stitch effects.

Singer XXX

Futura series. Less common, supported for archival compatibility.

Brother PEC

Legacy Brother format, embedded inside PES files. StitchKit can extract and write standalone PEC.

Roundtrip notes

All seven formats roundtrip with stitch-level fidelity. Color metadata roundtrips on formats that support it (PES, JEF, VP3); DST does not store color names, so colors map to indexed palette positions.