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:
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....)