DST thread color sheet

A DST color change is a command in the stitch stream. It does not carry red, green, or blue. DST and EXP store color stops only, not RGB. That is why the same file can open red in one program and blue in another. Both readers invented a palette. Neither one read a spool number.

The record is three bytes. X and Y are sums of 1, 3, 9, 27, and 81 units. One unit is 0.1 mm, so 81 units is 8.1 mm. A move larger than 12.1 mm is split across records. The control bits in the third byte decide whether the record is a stitch, a jump, a color stop, or the end of the file.

A move of 100 units in X, 10.0 mm, encodes as bytes 09 04 07 when it is a stitch. The same distance in positive Y is 60 10 13. Negative Y is 90 20 23. Negative X is 06 08 0B. Those four records were checked against a known DST reader, not drawn as a generic barcode.

A jump of 80 units sets the jump control and encodes as 02 00 87. A short stitch of 3 units is 00 01 03. The end record used here is 00 00 F3, and the header’s last byte, index 511, is 1A. The text header also carries LA:, ST:, CO:, and the plus and minus extents.

Rose Crest color 1 is RGB 180, 34, 50. CIEDE2000 against Madeira Polyneon 40 selects #1838 at ΔE 0.0. The same red is Isacord #1904 at ΔE 2.1, Sulky Rayon #1034 at ΔE 4.9, Brother Embroidery #107 at ΔE 10.9, Janome #244 at ΔE 3.0, and Robison-Anton #2418 at ΔE 1.4.

Ties in that search go to the lower catalog code. The screen list uses one decimal, half away from zero. A ΔE under 1 is a close stand-in for sewing. A ΔE above 5, such as Brother Embroidery on this red, is a different thread. Do not buy #107 and expect Foxy Red.

None of those six numbers are inside a DST of Rose Crest. They exist only while the browser still has the RGB. The free DST-to-PES tool drops that RGB and writes Brother 64 placeholders, starting at #29 and #2. Those placeholders are not the table below.

PES can store one byte per color, so the free PES writes the nearest Brother 64 index. Madeira 1838 does not fit in that byte. JEF can store a 32-bit color code, so the paid pack puts the catalog number there and lists the same number on a 1:1 sheet. The DST still cannot.

The operator sheet is drawn 1:1, using 2.83465 points per millimetre, with a crosshair on the design center and the studio name you type. It has no site watermark. The free summary PDF is a letter page with a stitchfileconverter.com footer. They are different files.

If you only have a DST, stop at the stop count. Nordic as a DST has two stops and 7,640 stitches at 148 mm. You can convert the path. You cannot name the thread. Ask the person who digitized it. Matching a guessed red will not recreate their palette.

EXP uses the same idea: a stop command and no RGB. Melco and Bernina EXP files on this bench are treated like DST when the question is color. Jumps and trims can still be translated. The sheet of brand numbers is relevant only after a color exists again.

The byte table and the brand table are the two checks on this page. One is the file format. The other is what you would buy if you still had RGB 180, 34, 50. Mixing them is how a DST ends up labeled as Madeira when the file never said so.

Brother 64 is a different list from Brother Embroidery. The machine palette has 64 slots. The thread brand has spool numbers such as #107. A PES color byte uses the machine slot. A shopping list uses the spool. The paid sheet prints the spool and still writes a legal byte into PES.

Header extents are the absolute maximum and minimum of the path, in 0.1 mm units. ST counts records including the end record. CO counts color changes. If you open a DST and the color count is zero, the file may be a single-color run with no stop command at all.