Corel to Tajima?

An embroidery company should be able to take any printed image of a logo and digitize it for you (for a substantial cost). Asking you to do it yourself is ... err... unusual. It may be just because they don't understand what you have. Creating a professional quality "sewing" file such as Tajima's .dst format is not a job for an amateur. There are many more variables to a sewing design than there are in an image. (Things like color jumps, starts and stops, sewing patterns, stitch lengths, etc.)

Most digitizing programs (I'm afraid to say all) don't accept vector graphics such as CDR files or AI. They all work from raster files such as .bmp or .jpg. Seems ridiculous, since the first thing they do is find the edges and convert to a form of outline file.

Assuming that you mean Corel Draw (and not Corel Word Perfect or Corel Paint), you can save (export) the corel file as some flavor of raster graphic, or just print it to give to the embroiderer.

OR, you could save it as a raster graphic and post the result in alt.binaries.crafts.pictures, with a request for someone to digitize it for you and post the result as a .dst (tajima) file along with a color chart (dst's don't have their own color information). The results are often quite good -

I would shop around for other embroidery shops - Vancouver is be big enough to have more than one, I'm sure!

- Herb

I gather you are using corel?

I think you are being asked to present your client with a .DST file. This is the universal Tajima machine format. you could almost call it the BMP of embroidery.

Corel is vector based graphics package, not embroidery design. You can do artwork in corel (which I do) and export it to a BMP or JPG. With that you can import it directly. Or, depending on the software you have (wilcom or pulse for example) you can copy / paste your vector artwork directly into the software and convert the vector objects to embroidery. This can save you stacks of time. Wilcom has some great tools which will remove the overlaps on your vector art. their website has some neat images of it.

Corel is nice, good luck with your quest! Let us know how you go :)