Stitch Sprint Help › Making designs
Artwork import
Stitch Sprint reads artwork with its own readers. It uses no Ghostscript and no PyMuPDF (both were removed for licensing in v0.19).
Vector artwork
| Format | How it is read |
|---|---|
| AI, PDF | PDFium (pypdfium2): fills, strokes, clipping masks, hidden layers, gradients, live text |
| EPS, PS | Stitch Sprint's own PostScript interpreter (no file access, with a time limit), turned into a PDF, then read like one. Illustrator, CorelDRAW and other procsets run as a printer would |
| SVG | Stitch Sprint's own reader: CSS classes, transforms, use/symbol, clipping, gradients, text in the fonts on your computer. Turned into a PDF, then read like one |
What happens to the art:
- Clipping masks are applied and hidden layers are left out, as Illustrator shows them. Art past the edge of the artboard is kept.
- Live text is turned into outlines in the font the file includes. An EPS that only names its font gets the same font on this computer, or the closest one; the report says when another font stood in. Each word is checked against PDFium's own drawing of it and traced where they differ.
- Gradients are sewn as a fill in their average colour. Transparency effects are not converted. A pattern fill becomes one of its colours.
- Shapes stacked exactly on top of each other are all sewn. Run Pathfinder > Merge if the art has them.
- A shape that covers the whole artboard (a background) is dropped.
- White is sewn as white thread by default. White: knockout treats it as bare fabric.
- Near-identical colours are merged into one.
- Detail under 1 mm² or thinner than 0.4 mm is skipped; the report says how many.
- A file that holds only a placed picture (a Photoshop EPS, a scan saved as PDF) is traced like a PNG logo. A picture placed next to vector shapes is ignored; trace it in Illustrator first.
- Type 1, CFF, Type 3, TrueType (Type 42) and CID fonts in EPS files are drawn as outlines. A CID-keyed font stored with Type 1 glyphs (rare, mostly Asian text in old files) isn't drawn; outline the text.
- An
.aisaved without "Create PDF Compatible File" works when it is really an EPS. Older Illustrator-only.aifiles need saving again.
Picture logos (PNG, JPG and others)
Also GIF, BMP, TIFF and WebP. The picture is traced to outlines, then digitized like vector art.
How it is traced:
- Cropped to the logo, scaled to 1600 px, median-filtered against JPEG speckle.
- Flat colours are found. Soft shades along edges and JPEG speckle are not colours of their own (frequent colours are merged under CIEDE2000 9; thin blend bands fold into their neighbours).
- Background is left out: the colour round the edge of the picture, where it touches the edge, and transparent pixels.
- Each colour is softened 1.2 px and traced half way up (marching squares).
Settings under Picture:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Colours | Keep at most this many. Auto finds them |
| Background colour inside the logo | Auto leaves it as fabric when the background is coloured (it is the garment the logo was drawn on) or when there is little of it (openings and gaps), and sews it when it is a real part of the design. Sew it or Leave as fabric decides yourself. Thin gaps are always fabric |
- Size: a print-resolution picture (150 dpi or more) keeps its size; anything else starts at 3.5 in wide. Set the size you want either way.
- Quality: traced at 300 dpi, or from a 150 dpi JPG, the reference logos sew within a few percent of their vector art (CHANGELOG 0.14).
- One thing a picture can't hold: a white outline round a logo on a white background looks like the background, so it isn't sewn. Use the vector file when there is one.
- Photos and shaded pictures keep only their main colours.
Artwork settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Size | artwork size | Width or height in inches (or mm); proportions kept |
| Row spacing | 0.2 mm (fabric may change it) | Fill density. Bigger = lighter, fewer stitches |
| Fill angle | auto | Angle of fill rows. Auto gives each shape the angle with the fewest row breaks; setting an angle turns auto off |
| White | stitch | Stitch white thread, or knock it out to fabric |
| Cap | off | Sew bottom up, from the centre out |
Each colour of an artwork can also have its own fill angle, row spacing and "all fill" setting. See Views, layers and the player.