HoopReady

AI to DST

Most logos begin life as an Adobe Illustrator file, and the .ai is the best thing you can send us — the shapes as they were drawn, not a picture of them. There is one condition, and it is a checkbox in Illustrator's Save dialog.

Two files that are both called .ai

Saved with PDF content
Illustrator's default. The file carries a complete PDF of the artwork next to Illustrator's own data, and it opens with the same bytes a PDF does. Our reader recognises it by those bytes, not by the name, and draws the PDF part.
Saved without
Other programs cannot see the artwork. An older Illustrator file or an EPS is PostScript, and the check refuses it and says how to fix it: “This Illustrator or EPS file has no PDF content for us to read. In Illustrator, choose Save As, tick “Create PDF Compatible File” and send it again — or export the artwork as a PDF or SVG.” A newer one opens in a PDF reader as a single page of text saying it was saved without PDF content — and that page of text is all our reader can see, so the check would measure it instead of your logo. Either way, the fix is the same box.

The free check takes .ai files directly and answers them the way it answers a PDF. Illustrator's own data — layers, swatches, effects not yet flattened — is not read. What we measure is the artwork as it is drawn.

What a clean Illustrator logo measures

Our own mark, drawn as vector shapes and read the way an .ai with PDF content is read, at 90 mm on rule set 1.3:

Colours measuredThinnest lineGradient share
32.78 mm0

That is what a drawing gives you: exactly the colours that were chosen, and a gradient share of zero because nothing was smoothed. A logo that measures like this is the easiest kind to digitize, and it decides the package on its own colour count rather than on noise from an export. How a PDF made from a scan measures instead is on PDF to DST.

Artboards become pages

An Illustrator document with several artboards — the logo, a mono version, a favicon — saves every one of them as a page of the PDF inside the file. The check reads one page and refuses more, in these words: “…has 2 pages; send the one page with the design on it”. Guessing which artboard you meant would be worse than asking. In the Save As dialog, “Save each artboard to a separate file” gives you one file per artboard; send the one with the logo.

Before you save

Text
Type › Create Outlines, so the letters are shapes.
Strokes
Anything under 1 mm at your finished width is flagged; outline strokes you want kept (Object › Path › Outline Stroke) and thicken them first.
Placed images
A photo placed inside the logo is still a photo and measures like one. Keep the logo itself vector.
Size
The artboard size does not matter; the width you type into the order does.

Delivery takes 1–3 business days, most orders the same day.

Questions

Is an .ai file better than a PNG?
Yes, if it holds the drawing the logo was made as. Shapes drawn in Illustrator measure clean — flat colours, no gradient, lines at their real width — where a PNG exported from them has already been turned into pixels at some resolution somebody chose. Send the .ai, or a PDF saved from it; both reach our reader the same way.
How do I know if my .ai has PDF content?
Open it in any PDF viewer, or drop it into the free check. If the viewer shows the artwork, it has. If it shows a page of text saying the file was saved without PDF content, or the check answers with the sentence quoted on this page, open it in Illustrator, choose Save As, tick “Create PDF Compatible File” and save again.
Can I send an EPS or a CorelDRAW file instead?
Not as they are. An EPS is PostScript, which our reader does not draw, and a CorelDRAW .cdr is not a format we read at all. Export either as a PDF or an SVG from the program that made it; that loses nothing a machine file needs.
Do you need the fonts I used?
Not if the text is outlined. In Illustrator select the text and choose Type › Create Outlines before saving, so the letters travel as shapes rather than as a request for a font. Why that matters, with a measurement, is on the SVG to DST page.
Will you send the DST back as an .ai?
No, but Premium and Enterprise include an editable SVG of the shapes we digitized from, and Illustrator opens it. Every delivery carries the machine files, a stitch simulation and the thread list; what each file in the folder is for is on the file formats page.

Check your .ai file freePrices and terms

The measurements come from web/tools/format_checks.py, run against the same checker the site uses; the two refusals are quoted from the service's own code and reply. Vector files, .ai included, are accepted up to 8 MB.