HoopReady

PDF to DST

“Send a PDF” is the advice every printer gives, and for embroidery it is only half advice. A PDF is a container, not a promise: it can hold the drawing your designer made, or a photograph of a printout with a PDF wrapper around it. Those two are not the same file to us, and the difference shows up in the check as a number.

A drawing and a picture, both called PDF

The same mark, sent twice at 90 mm on rule set 1.3: once as the drawing it was made as, once as a photograph-quality image wrapped in a PDF page.

What is insideSizeColors measuredThinnest lineGradient share
Vector shapes710 bytes32.78 mm0
A compressed image58 KB40.56 mm0.013

The second row is not a worse PDF. It is a picture, and it measures like one: an extra colour that nobody drew, a gradient share off zero, and a thinnest line that has gone soft. If your PDF is of that kind, nothing is lost by sending the PNG instead — but something is gained by finding the file it was made from.

What our reader does with the page

One page
More than one and the file is refused, in those words: “two-pages.pdf has 2 pages; send the one page with the design on it”. A brand guide has a cover and a palette page, and guessing which one you meant is worse than asking.
Drawn at measuring size
The page is rendered straight at the size the check measures in, never rendered small and scaled up. That is what keeps a hairline a hairline instead of a soft band, which would quietly pass a rule it should fail.
Page size is not design size
The width that decides everything is the one you type into the order, in millimetres. An A4 page with a small logo in the middle is drawn to fit, so crop the page to the design before sending it.
Transparency
Composited onto white before measuring, so an empty page background never counts as a colour.

PDF and SVG measure the same

People ask which vector format to send as though it changed the answer. It does not: the same mark as 286 bytes of SVG and 710 bytes of PDF came back identical — 3 colours and a 2.78 mm thinnest line from both, and the same verdict. Send whichever you have. The one place the two do differ is lettering, and that is on the SVG to DST page.

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

Questions

Is a PDF better than a PNG to send?
Only if the PDF holds a drawing. A PDF is a container: it can carry vector shapes, or it can carry a photograph with a PDF wrapper around it, and the two measure differently in our check — in the test on this page, 710 bytes of drawing and 58 KB of wrapped picture, with 4 colours found in the second against 3 in the first. If yours came out of a design tool it is probably the good kind; if it came out of a scanner or a phone, it is the other kind and a PNG of the same thing would be no worse.
My logo is on page 2 of a brand guide. Can you take it from there?
Not as it is: the check refuses a file with more than one page and says so — “two-pages.pdf has 2 pages; send the one page with the design on it”. It is a deliberate refusal rather than a limitation. A brand guide has a cover, a palette page and a logo page, and silently digitizing whichever one happened to be first is a worse answer than asking. Export the single page with the mark on it and send that.
Does the PDF's page size decide how big the embroidery will be?
No, and this catches people out. An A4 page with a 40 mm logo in the middle is still just a picture of your logo to us: the page is drawn to fit the working size, and the width that matters is the one you type into the order in millimetres. It does mean a logo sitting in a corner of a big empty page is drawn smaller and measured with less detail, so crop the page to the design before you send it.
Should I convert the PDF to a PNG myself first?
Please do not. Exporting to PNG means picking a resolution, and picking it too low is the one mistake that cannot be undone afterwards — our reader draws a PDF at the size it measures at, so a hairline stays a hairline instead of arriving as a soft grey band. Send the PDF and let it be drawn once, at the right size.
Can you take the DST straight out of a PDF without redrawing?
No. A PDF describes shapes and colours on a page; a DST describes where a needle goes. Nothing in the first says stitch direction, underlay or the order the shapes are sewn in, so having clean vector shapes saves the tracing and none of the digitizing. Why that is so is the whole of the PNG to DST page.

Check your file freePrices and terms

Both PDFs above were built and measured by web/tools/format_checks.py against the same checker the site runs, at 90 mm on rule set 1.3; the refusal is quoted from the service's own reply. Vector files are accepted up to 8 MB, everything else up to 20 MB.