“Custom embroidery digitizing,” “embroidery digitizing,” or simply “digitizing” is a necessary step for embroidering your company design or other custom embroidery design on promotional products.
The term “digitizing” is not exclusive to the machine embroidery industry, thus people outside the industry have preconceived assumptions of what it is based on the context outside of machine embroidery. Generally speaking, “digitizing” or to “digitize” means to make a digital format or representation of something.
Let us assume you already have a clean and crisp raster or vector file of your logo. Popular raster file formats include JPG, GIF, and BMP. Popular vector file formats include AI, CDR, and EPS. Whatever image file format you may have, unfortunately, computerized embroidery machines will not be able to embroider your logo using any type of “image” or “graphics” file due to the simple fact that embroidery machines do not understand them.
In machine embroidery, digitizing involves the use of embroidery digitizing software to turn your company logo into a digital file that contains instructions for embroidery machines. When the embroidery file is loaded to an embroidery machine, it embroiders the logo at an amazing speed and accuracy as instructed by the embroidery file.
Popular embroidery file formats for the commercial embroidery industry include DST (Tajima), DSB (Barudan), DSZ (ZSK), TAP (Happy), and EXP (Melco). The most popular out all them is DST by Tajima because it is the universal embroidery file format. Meaning, DST files can be read by all embroidery machines.