JANOME Embroidery Software Instruction Book
Chapter 25 Reading and Writing Design Files
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This section describes embroidery stitch and outline design formats, as well as 
how to open embroidery files in JANOME Embroidery Software. It also describes 
saving designs for machine as well as sending and receiving designs by direct 
connection. Writing designs to Flash Memory reader/writer is also covered.
Embroidery design formats
Embroidery designs are saved in one of two 
formats – ‘outline’ format or ‘stitch’ format. JAN is 
an outline format and JEF and SEW are stitch 
formats.
Note  For details of specific formats supported by 
JANOME Embroidery Software, see Supported 
embroidery file formats.
Outline files
Outline or ‘condensed’ files are high-level formats 
which contain object outlines, object details and 
stitch data. When you open an outline file in 
EasyDesign, corresponding stitch types, digitizing 
methods and effects are applied.
Outline files can be scaled, transformed and 
reshaped without affecting stitch density or 
quality. After modification in EasyDesign, you can 
choose to save your design to the native JAN 
format, or to a different format altogether.
Stitch files
Different embroidery machines speak different 
languages. Each has its own control commands for 
the various machine functions. Before you can 
stitch a design, it must be in a format which can be 
interpreted by the embroidery machine. Stitch or 
‘expanded’ designs are low-level formats for direct 
use by machines. They contain information about 
the position, length and color of each stitch. When 
they are read into EasyEdit, stitch files do not 
contain object information such as outlines or 
stitch types, but present the design as a collection 
of stitch blocks. Stitch blocks consist of individual 
stitches.
You can scale raw stitch format designs, but 
because the stitch count does not change, the 
density increases or decreases with the design 
size. Thus you should not scale stitch designs by 
more than ±5% or some areas may be too thickly 
or too thinly covered.
While stitch designs are generally not suited to 
scaling, JANOME Embroidery Software can 
interpret object outlines, stitch types and spacing 
from stitch data with some success. By default, 
stitch files are converted to outlines and objects 
upon opening in EasyEdit. These ‘recognized’ 
designs can be scaled with stitches recalculated for 
the new outlines. Processing is effective for most 
stitch designs but cannot produce the same level of 
quality as original outlines and may not handle 
some fancy stitches.
File sources
While embroidery files are broadly classified as 
‘outline’ or ‘stitch’, JANOME Embroidery Software 
internally tags files as belonging to one of four 
Embossed Fill 
object
Manual object
Original stitch design Design reduced by 5%