HoopReady
DST file viewer
Open a Tajima .dst file and see what it will sew: every stitch in the order the machine makes it, the size in millimetres, the colour stops, the jumps and the trims. The file is read by this page in your browser and never uploaded.
Showing our own crest from logo to embroidery, in the thread colours its thread list gives. Choose your own file and it replaces the example.
What a DST file holds
Less than most people expect, and that is why it opens on almost every commercial machine. A DST is a 512-byte text header followed by a list of three-byte records, one per movement of the hoop. Each record moves at most 12.1 mm in each direction, in steps of a tenth of a millimetre, and says what kind of movement it is.
| Record | What the machine does | How the viewer shows it |
|---|---|---|
| Stitch | Moves the hoop and drops the needle | A line of thread from the last needle drop |
| Jump | Moves the hoop without sewing, for a move longer than one stitch | Hidden, or a dashed coral line with Show jumps |
| Colour stop | Stops for the next thread, or changes needle on a multi-needle machine | A new block, with its own swatch |
| End | The design is finished | Where reading stops |
The header repeats some of this as text, which is what the Header says line under the drawing prints when the file has it:
No colours, only stops
A DST knows that the machine stops, not what goes on next. That is the one thing every first-time viewer gets wrong: the colours on screen are the viewer's guess. The thread list that travels beside the file is what says which spool goes on at each stop, which is why every order of ours includes one. Pick the colours under the drawing and the viewer paints each block with the thread you chose; the formats that do carry colour, and how much, are compared on embroidery file formats.
Trims are read from jumps
A DST has no command for cutting the thread. A machine decides to cut from the jumps themselves, and how many jumps in a row count as a cut is a setting on the machine rather than something the file can state. The viewer counts a trim at the third jump in a row after something has been sewn — the default in pyembroidery, the library our own engine writes with — and not after a colour stop, where the machine has stopped for a new thread anyway. If your machine is set to a different number, its count will differ by exactly that.
What a viewer cannot tell you
Where the needle goes is all a stitch file records, so it is all any viewer can show. It cannot show how the fabric pulls, whether the density suits a cap or a towel, or how the design sews on your machine with your stabilizer — a stitch file that looks clean can still pucker. The crest in the example is a stitch file our engine wrote on rule set 1.3. It counted 20,944 stitches when it wrote the 90 mm design, and that is the number the viewer reads back out of the DST. It has never been sewn, and nothing on this site claims otherwise.
If the file you are looking at is not the one you need, we make them from artwork: a logo in, DST and PES out, checked by a person before it reaches you. The check on your artwork is free and needs no account.
Check your artwork freePNG to DST
Questions
- How do I open a DST file?
- Choose it in the viewer at the top of this page, or drop it there. It is drawn stitch by stitch in the order the machine sews it, with the size in millimetres and the number of stitches, colour stops, jumps and trims beside it. Embroidery software opens it too, but you do not need any to look at one.
- Is my file uploaded anywhere?
- No. The page reads the file in your browser and draws it there; nothing about it is sent to us or anybody else. That is also why there is no size queue and no sign-in.
- Can I turn a DST into a PNG or a JPG?
- Save as PNG gives you the drawing at one pixel per tenth of a millimetre on a transparent background, in the thread colours you picked. Any image editor turns that PNG into a JPG. The PNG is a picture of the stitches, useful for a proof or a listing; it cannot be turned back into a machine file.
- Why are the colours wrong?
- Because a DST has none to get right. It records where the machine stops for a new thread, not which thread that is, so every viewer invents the colours. Set each block to the thread you will use with the swatches under the drawing, or look at the thread list that came with the file.
- Can I edit a DST here?
- No. A DST is the finished needle path, and changing it well means changing the shapes it was made from and sewing them out again, which is digitizing rather than editing. If the file is ours, a change round covers size, placement, thread colour and small shape fixes.
- Why does my software show a different stitch count?
- Programs count different things: some count every record, some count only needle drops, some count a trim or a colour stop as a stitch. This viewer counts the stitch records in the file, one per needle drop, which is also how our own engine counts. Compare counts from the same program, and from the same format.