Other companies have snotty sales people. Some companies (like Bernina) seem to sell only through authorized resellers. Now a subjective (personal) opinion about the embroidery software market: It is very difficult to find out what software costs and - this is funny - where and how to buy. High-end embroidery software suites should include all of the software types listed above. Bernina's Embroidery software is based on Corel. Pulse's embroideryi2 is an add-on for either Illustrator or Corel Draw. Often, the drawing module is based on existing high-end vector graphics software. Complete embroidery CAD Suites, support all the design stages.Organizers help to organize designs on your hard disk.If you just use a digitizer to translate letters from a vector file you likely will get bad results, since the filling algorithm is not optimized for lettering. Lettering programs include optimized 'stitch' fonts.Finally, editors also should allow to edit individual stitches (for fine tuning). Editors then allow for direct drawing of higher-level embroidery objects that can be be parametrized, e.g. Design parts are often first drawn in some ordinary vector format since it allow for easy manipulation. Editors can draw designs in bother vector and embroidery object (stitch section format.They usually include a viewer and can do transformations. Converters can convert from one format to another.

Transformers can resize, rotate, (sometimes) change colors, i.e.Viewers allow to view files, useful for script generated formats for example).Some digitizers work automatically (or almost) for both raster and vector images, others give a lot of control to the user. Digitizers can translate a vector format to a stitch section representations or directly to stitches (not desirable).Vectorizers can be found in typical general purpose drawing software like Illustrator or Inkscape, but also in embroidery software. Vectorizers can translate a bitmap image to vector formats.Software to create designs for 'manual' embroidery.Roughly speaking, we can distinguish between several types of software, although sometimes the frontiers are blurred, so you also can consider the following as list of modules that your software should have. From embroidery objects one can generated stitches that then can be exported to proprietary machine (stitch) formats that can uploaded to an embroidery machine. These objects can be created directly through technical drawing or be translated (digitized) from vector drawings. Typical embroidery software allows to create embroidery design files that define parametrized embroidery objects such as lines, sating columns or fill areas.

Franz Xaver Simm: Die Stickerin Oil on canvas, 94 x 68 cm

Software to view embroidery files