Open a DST file and watch it stitch out
Drop in a DST design from Tajima and most industrial multi-needle machines and see the order it sews in — every colour block, jump, trim and machine stop, plus its real size and stitch count. The file is read on your own computer and never uploaded.
What a DST file carries
A DST carries no thread colours at all — the format has nowhere to put them. It records stitches and the stops between them, so what you see here uses placeholder colours for each block. That is the file being read correctly, not the viewer guessing: if you opened the same DST in any other software it would invent a different palette.
Every DST opens with a fixed 512-byte header holding the design name, the stitch and colour-change counts and the design's extents, followed by three bytes per stitch. That header is why a DST can tell you its size and stitch count before a single stitch is drawn.
What to check before you sew a DST
- Colour block count, not colours. You cannot check the colours — there are none. What you can check is how many blocks there are, which is how many times the machine will stop for a thread change.
- Extents against your hoop. The header records the design's width and height. Compare them to your hoop before you commit thread and stabiliser to it.
- Stitch count against machine memory. Older machines have a design-size ceiling. The count is in the header, so you can check it here rather than discovering it at the machine.
- Whether it was digitized for your size. A DST is a fixed list of needle positions. If the extents are far from the size you want, rescaling will wreck the density — better to go back to the artwork.
Why people open DST files here
DST is the format people send you, because it loads on almost anything. That makes opening one the most common reason anybody needs a viewer at all: you have been sent a design, you do not know how big it is, how many colours it stops for, or what order it sews in.
Common questions about DST files
Why are the colours in my DST wrong or grey?
They are not wrong — a DST has no colours in it to be wrong. The format stores stitches and the stops between them and nothing about thread, so every viewer and every machine assigns its own placeholder palette. Your colour order has to travel separately.
Can I change or edit the DST here?
No, this page only reads. A stitch file is a fixed list of needle positions, and meaningful changes belong back at the artwork stage. To put the same stitches in a different format, use the file converter.
Is my DST uploaded anywhere?
No. It is parsed by JavaScript in your own browser and never sent to us. Load the page, disconnect from the internet, and open a file — it still works.
What is the stitch count useful for?
Two things: older machines have a ceiling on design size, and commercial embroiderers price by the thousand stitches. The count sits in the DST header, so you can read it without sewing anything.
Opening other formats
This page is set up for DST, but the viewer itself reads every format we support. For a different one, try the PES viewer, JEF viewer — or the stitch simulator, which takes PES, DST, JEF, SEW, EXP, VP3 and XXX and explains what the playback is showing you in more depth.
Need to change a file's format rather than look at it? That is a re-encode, not a re-digitize — the stitches are already decided and only the container changes. Use the embroidery file converter. Starting from artwork instead of a stitch file? The free converter digitizes an image and exports DST among every other format.
For what the formats actually differ on — which machines read them, and what happens to your thread colours in each — see PES vs DST vs JEF.