I have owned DraWings X3 for about a year. I have a Brother PR-600 embroidery machine. Being new to embroidery, I have only played around with the program. I have a pretty good command of Corel becuse I love to create graphics. I am into T-shirt design and I have recently opened a graphics design business. I wanted to include embroidery but I can't seem to figure out how to do this because it takes so much time to create an embroidery (hooping, setup sewing) at least one that contains any color. The DraWings program is pretty straight forward but I do have one question: How do I get the Corel program to import an Adobe CS2 vector graphic? If I reduce the file to a Adobe 9 version and press CTRL-I it imports but it will not do CS2. Also, Corel DraWings does not recognize the Brother PR-600 machine. I read some where that I could export the finished embroidery into a .dst file and then use my PE Design Pro software to convert it to a .pes file. This works but it adds steps to the process and the colors need to be adjusted before you can save the file in the .pes format. Can anyone help me with these issues?
Lenny, while I've been a Corel user since ver.3 (1992) and a Drawings user since the program was first released.............I think 4 years now, I can't help you with your Brother machine. I use .dst files.
As far as using your CS2 files, back-saving, as you discovered, should work..........or you can also try and save your file as a Ilustrator .eps file.
Corel and Illy don't always "play nice" together. In this case, however, I believe that X3 was released before CS2, hence part of the incompatibility issue.
Concerning your embroidery knowledge.........IMHO, there is no substitute for experience and practice, practice, practice. Watching/studying how well digitized designs sew out will help. Reading a lot of books on basic embroidery techniques will also greatly help.
Fortunately you have in your hands, a very cool program with a fairly sophisticated stitch engine to help you along. As long as you present Drawings will "embroidery-ready" information, the defaults the program will give you, are a great starting point.
My 2 stitches.............
I'm not sure about CS2 format, but I think its a raster file format. U might be able to save the file in *.tiff or *.esp file format, the imort it into Drawings (DW). With DW, U can export the file to Modular Basic and the save the file as *.pes file format.
U can go to http://www.emblibrary.com , they do have some help ful tips on different embroidery projects...
Hope this helps....
Doug
Doug,
CS2 is the next to the latest version of Adobe Illustrator. I use it to create .ai vector files which I then import into DraWings. Since the files are already vector they convert without problem when you select the stitch tab in DraWings. I resigned myself to just saving the files created in Drawings to a .dts format and running them through the Brother program designed for creating patterns ( PE Design). I could create .PES files in PE Design but it is not as powerful graphic wise as DraWings. Also emblibrary.com is a very good web site. Have you tried www.windstarembroidery.com? They are also super and Deb is a super smart person who is always willing to help. What kind of projects are you interested in? Are you mainly into embroidery or do you also do other graphic design? I do T-Shirts and other personalized gifts such as mugs and photos. I also do wide fromat printing like posters and signs with vinyl on my Roland SPV-300 printer. I also have the newest T-Jet 3 digital garment printer for printing directly on to textiles. I have recently started a graphics business here in Germany. Hopefully, things will go well and it will work. I am really interested in exchanging ideas with people who have the same interest. This started as a hobby many years ago and I finally have it together enough to try to earn some money with it. I don't want to get rich I just want to make a meger living doing something I love. I have not given up my day job. I am a US Army Civilian working in Aviation Logistics in Germany. I am the number two person for helicopter maintenance in Europe. I love my day job but I also love the creative side of working with graphics.
Thanks for your input.
Lenny
Lenny:
I am not familiar with DraWings, per se, but I can give you a little help on the file format regarding the PR-600 machine.
Your embroidery files, as created by DraWings, are .DST files. These are also called 'tapes' as the software format for the machines used to be by (paper) tape. And the .DST designation is the embroidery file format that the programable Tajima embroidery machines utilize. Since Tajima was one of the major innovators of embroidery machines, and the first to have a solid software format for embroidery, just about all other embroidery digitizing software understands the DST file format. Each manufacturer of embroidery machines and/or embroidery digitizing software have their own native file formats.
Between my brother-in-law, my wife and myself, we own three different digitizing software packages. My brother-in-law uses Pulse from Toyota, my wife uses the PES format from Brother and I have one from SuperTech (Generations). All three of these understand and can read and write DST files, as well as their own format of embroidery file. The DST file format is a standard that all embroidery software, at least, is able to import or convert to their respective native embroidery format.
My brother-in-law has three 6-head Brother embroidery machines (and a Toyota single head and a 2-head Tajima and a Tajima Chenile machine), uses the Toyota software to generate DST files, and then uses the Brother software to convert the DST file to native Brother format for the 6-head machines.
As to your problem with the CS2 files, if the files are compressed when they were saved (I believe that this is the native action by Adobe) then you will have problems opening them in Corel Draw. If the AI file is saved without compression, you should be able to import it.
Are these files being generated by you or are they supplied by someone else? In either case, I would ask for the graphics in either EPS format or PDF. Corel can handle both of these, easily.
Also, as you gain experience with embroidery, you will find that you will always have to tweak the autogenerated embroidery files (stitch density, pull, sew order, etc.) to obtain the best sew out.
(Just my two stitches....)
The Adobe products are to spendy for me, therefore I'm not to familiar with them. This is why I use Coreldraw and Drawings. I have been usiing CD since about V3 or 4. I retired from Boeing in 2000 and started a T-shirt, sign business and other products like sublimation of mugs. I would have liked to get the T-Jet, but due to the budgeting I disided to add the Embroidery to the business. I do most of the art and digirtizing myself. It's more of a hobby than a business. I was in the Army ad a crew chief for L-19, Beaver and Otters back in the 60's. I sure enjoyed it. I use Drawings X3 pro and Embird most of the time. I have only been at the Embroidering little over a year now... Happy holidays Doug