When one brings in artwork whether it’s camera ready art, a photo, a fax, or a magazine clipping this has to be converted into special ‘stitch data’ that can then be transferred via floppy disc or direct cable to the embroidery machine. The process of converting the data is done by a person called a ‘digitizer.’ This entails ‘interpreting’ an image into a computer language (file) that is filled with special commands (codes) for the embroidery machines. When this file is input in the machine and setup according to the specific color sequence, the final result is the embroidery that you see.
The created embroidery file is indeed a ‘program’ with a string of commands that can be adjusted in varying degrees depending on the complexity of the file. This file holds information about the number of stitches, the type of stitches, the sequence of thread colors, and controls the machine movements throughout the embroidery process. In many ways it’s somewhat similar to ‘behind the scenes’ in a movie so to speak – a constantly changing environment of chop, crop, edit, and modify.
