Embroidery File Formats Explained: DST vs PES vs JEF

The Alphabet Soup of Formats

The most confusing part of embroidery for beginners is the file types. Here is the definitive breakdown.

Home Formats (Smart Files)

Examples: .PES (Brother), .JEF (Janome), .VP3 (Viking)

These files contain "Object" data. They know the colors (e.g., "Brother Blue 403"), they know the hoop size, and they sometimes contain the vector paths. They are designed to be user-friendly.

Industrial Formats (Dumb Files)

Examples: .DST (Tajima), .EXP (Melco)

The industry standard is DST. It is considered a "dumb" file because it contains NO color data. It only contains commands: "Move X, Move Y, Drop Needle, Trim".

Why use DST? It is bulletproof. It works on 99% of machines. It never interprets colors wrongly because it doesn't interpret them at all—it relies on the operator to set the colors on the machine.