Design Center, Programmable Stitch Creator

■Design Center

Design Center is used to manually create embroidery patterns from images using a four-stage pro- cedure. The images may come from scanning a printed image or can be created with an appli- cation like Paint®. Design Center automatically detects outlines in the image and replaces them with broken lines that can be edited and assigned sewing attributes.

•The four stages of Design Center

Original Image Stage:

Open an image ﬁle and select one or more colors that the application will use to trace the outlines.

Line Image Stage:

The original color image is replaced with a black-and-white image (the colors selected in the Original Image Stage become black, and all other colors become white).

This image can be edited using pens of different thicknesses. (You can also start with this step to draw a black-and-white image by hand.)

When the image is ready, start the automatic tracing process.

Figure Handle Stage:

The black-and-white image is replaced with a set of outlines made of editable broken lines. You can edit the broken lines by moving, inserting or deleting editing points.

Sew Setting Stage:

In this ﬁnal step, apply sewing attributes (thread color and sew type) to the outlines and the inside regions.

At any stage, you can save your work to retrieve it later.

Saving your work as you move through the stages will be helpful if you make changes, then later decide to use the original pattern.

When your image has reached the Sew Setting Stage, you can import it into Layout & Editing, where the image can be moved and scaled as a single pattern.

■Programmable Stitch Creator

Programmable Stitch Creator allows you to create, edit and save ﬁll/stamp and motif stitch pat- terns that can be applied as a programmable ﬁll stitch or motif stitch, or as a stamp to the en- closed regions of embroidery patterns both in Design Center and Layout & Editing.

■Font Creator

Font Creator allows you to create, edit and save custom font characters, which can be used in Layout & Editing.

■Design Database

Design Database allows you to easily preview the embroidery design ﬁles on your computer so that you can ﬁnd the desired design, which can be opened with or imported into Layout & Edit- ing. From Design Database, you can also convert the ﬁles to other formats (.dst, .exp, .pcs, .hus,

.vip, .shv, .jef, .sew, .csd, and .xxx), or print or output as an HTML ﬁle images of the embroidery designs in a selected folder. In addition, the sewing information for the embroidery designs in a selected folder can be outputted as a CSV ﬁle for use in other database applications.

In addition, the embroidery designs can be written to original cards.