Formats

Embroidery file formats explained

There are dozens of machine-embroidery formats and they all do the same job: tell a needle where to go. The differences are in what else they record — and that is what decides whether a converted design keeps its colours.

The short version

Format	Machines	Thread colours	Max step
PES	Brother, Babylock	Yes	±2047
PEC	Brother (older, inside PES)	Palette index	±2047
DST	Tajima, most commercial	No	±121
JEF	Janome	Palette index	±127
VP3	Husqvarna, Pfaff	Yes	255
EXP	Melco, Bernina	No	±127
XXX	Singer	Yes	±124

"Max step" is how far one command may move the needle, in tenths of a millimetre. It is the number that decides whether a design converts cleanly: a stitch legal in VP3 may be too long for a single DST command and has to be split into several.

What every format has in common

All of them store the same five ideas:

Stitch — move here and put the needle down.
Jump — move here without stitching, leaving a loose thread to trim.
Trim — cut the thread.
Colour change / stop — pause so the operator can rethread.
End — the design is finished.

Everything else — headers, thread tables, thumbnails, extents — is bookkeeping around that list.

The ones that carry colour, and the ones that do not

DST and EXP store no colour at all. They record that a thread change happens, not what to change to. So when someone sells a design "in all formats", the DST in that bundle is colourless by nature, and whatever colours you see when you open it were picked by your software.

JEF and PEC reference a manufacturer palette by index rather than storing free RGB, which is why the same design can show slightly different names in different apps.

The practical rule. Converting to DST or EXP loses colour names permanently — there is nowhere in the file to put them. The colour stops survive, so the machine still pauses in the right places. Keep the original if the names matter to you.

Formats you may be offered that are not here

ART (Bernina), HUS and SHV (Husqvarna), PCS (Pfaff), SEW (Janome), U01 (Barudan) and EMB (Wilcom) all exist. EMB is the notable one: it is Wilcom's working format, closed, and there is no open reader for it — so an app that claims to open .emb is either converting something else or not telling the truth. Hoopside does not open it and says so.

Which one should you ask a seller for?

Ask for the format your machine reads, and for DST as a backup. If you only get DST, convert it — see how a real conversion works — and accept that you will be picking thread colours yourself.

Why there are so many

Each format came from a machine manufacturer solving its own problem at its own time, and none of them had any reason to make life easy for the others. DST is the exception only because Tajima's commercial machines were everywhere early, so supporting DST became the safe default for everyone else.

This is also why "embroidery file" is not one thing. A design sold "in all formats" is the same stitches encoded seven or eight ways, and the versions are not equivalent: the DST in that bundle has no colours, and the PES may be a version your machine does not read.

Stitch data is the same everywhere

Underneath, the actual needle path is identical across formats. That is what makes conversion possible at all: decode one encoding into an ordered list of stitches and commands, then write that list out in another. Nothing about the design changes, only how the file spells it.

What does not survive conversion is anything the target format cannot hold — thread names into DST, for instance. And what has to be adjusted is anything the target cannot express in one command, which is where the "max step" column above stops being trivia.

Which format should you keep?

Keep whatever you bought, always. Convert to what your machine needs and save that as a second file. The original is the only copy with everything the designer put in it; a converted copy has been through a lossy door, even when the stitches are identical.

A note on file size

Embroidery designs are small — tens to a few hundred kilobytes — because they are lists of coordinates. If a "design" is several megabytes, it is probably a zip containing many formats at once, or it contains an embedded preview image. Neither is a problem; it just means you have not reached the design yet.

How to convert a DST to PES — and why renaming the file fails — What a real format conversion does to the stitches, and why changing the extension produces a file the machine refuses.
How to open a PES file on your phone — What a .pes file is, how to view one on Android, and what to check before you hoop anything.
What is a JEF file, and how do you open one? — Janome's format: what it stores, how to view one, and how it differs from PES and DST.

Open any of these on your phone

Hoopside opens PES, DST, JEF, EXP, VP3, XXX and PEC designs on Android and shows each one the way it will stitch — real size, stitch count, numbered colour stops and the thread list. Viewing is free, with no ads and no account, and nothing leaves your phone.