DST is the oldest embroidery format still in daily use, and yet it is the one everybody asks for. A 1995 industrial machine and a 2026 model both read it without an adapter. That is not an accident of technology: it is a design decision that has survived forty years.
A Tajima invention
The format comes from Tajima, the Japanese manufacturer that industrialised multi-head embroidery in the 1980s. The constraint back then was not user comfort but memory: a few kilobytes to store an entire design on a 3.5-inch floppy.
Hence an extremely sober encoding: each stitch occupies three bytes. Two bytes encode the horizontal and vertical movement (a value between -121 and +121 tenths of a millimetre), the third carries the instruction type. Nothing else. No design name, no palettes, no metadata.
What DST does not contain
This is the part that surprises beginners: a DST file contains no colour information. It contains stops — thread changes — but not the thread colours themselves. The machine, or the operator, decides which thread goes where.
Practical consequence: a blue-and-red logo can be stitched in green and yellow without touching the file. For a company that adapts its colours to seasons or clients, that is an advantage rather than a limitation.
DST also does not state which stitch type to use (running, satin, fill), nor the density, nor the stitch order beyond the actual sequence of points. All of that is already baked into the file.
How it compares
| Format | Origin | Colour data | Strengths | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DST | Tajima | No | Universal, compact, industrial | No colours or metadata |
| PES | Brother | Yes | Rich, readable by Brother home machines | Rarely read by industrial machines |
| JEF | Janome | Yes | Standard for Janome home machines | Locked to the Janome ecosystem |
| HUS | Husqvarna / Viking | Yes | Comfortable on Viking machines | Few tools export it |
| EXP | Melco | No | Close to DST, used on Melco machines | Less widespread |
| VP3 | Pfaff | Yes | Good results on Pfaff | Niche |
The rule that follows is simple: deliver DST, and add PES or JEF if the client has a specific home machine. The reverse — sending PES to an industrial workshop — gets you a phone call within the hour.
Why it was never replaced
Three reasons.
It is already everywhere. Industrial machines, digitizing software, online converters, club designs: everything reads DST. A richer format would have had to be adopted simultaneously by every manufacturer, and that never happened.
It is small and robust. A 6,000-stitch logo weighs about 18 kilobytes. Easy to email, to store by the thousand, to reopen twenty years later.
It is unambiguous. A DST does not lie: what the machine will stitch is exactly what the file contains. That is what makes it a production format rather than a working format.
Working formats did change
Digitizers do not work directly in DST. They draw in an editable vector format — often the software's proprietary file — and export to DST at delivery time. DST is the output, not the draft.
That is also why a DST is hard to edit: once the stitches are written, the objects are gone. Changing a logo inside a DST is like retouching a photo at pixel level: possible, expensive, approximate.
What to do before ordering
- Always ask for the DST first, even if you also request a PES.
- State the final size in millimetres: the same file at 60 mm and at 120 mm does not behave the same way.
- Keep a copy of the source vector file if you have one: that is what allows a clean edit in five years.
- Sew a test on scrap fabric before running a batch of garments.
For turning an image into a DST, the step-by-step process is detailed in our image-to-DST guide. And if you are still torn between formats for your machine, the full comparison is here.
Ready for your logo
Conversion takes seconds: upload the image, set the width in millimetres, download the DST. The file is ready for Tajima, Barudan, industrial Brother, ZSK and most home machines.