PESBrother, Baby Lock →DSTTajima
Convert PES to DST
This conversion usually happens for one of two reasons: you are sending a design out to a shop that runs commercial machines, or you have moved from a home Brother to something industrial. Either way DST is the right target — it is the closest thing this industry has to a universal format. The trade you are making is colour: your PES knows what thread every block should be, and DST has nowhere to put that.
Stitch preview
PES FILE PREVIEW · SAMPLE DESIGN Showing a realistic stitch-out sample — choose or drop your own file.
Sampler · Roundel
Stitches—
Threads—
Width—
Height—
Jumps—
Avg. density—
Thread order
Hoop fit
The two formats
.PES · BROTHER, BABY LOCK
Brother PES
Brother's own format, used across Baby Lock and Bernina Deco machines. It carries thread colours and a design thumbnail, so a converted file arrives with its palette already set.
.DST · TAJIMA
Tajima DST
Written for Tajima commercial machines and read by nearly everything since. It stores stitch movements only — no thread colours at all, which is why a palette is assigned rather than read.
What to watch for
Your colours stop here
PES stores a thread colour for every block. DST stores none at all — not approximations, not indexes, nothing. The colour changes survive as stop commands, so the machine still knows where to pause, but which thread goes in is no longer written down anywhere. If you are handing this file to someone else, send a screenshot of the coloured preview with it, or write the thread list out. Shops expect this and will ask; it is not a fault in the conversion.
A 12.1 mm ceiling on any single move
DST encodes each axis from ±1, ±3, ±9, ±27 and ±81 tenths of a millimetre, so the longest travel it can express in one record is 121 units — 12.1 mm. Anything longer is broken across several records. This is why a design converted to DST often reports more jumps than the PES you started with: the stitching is identical, but long travels between areas now take several records where PES needed one.
Trims are a real difference, not a rounding error
PES and DST both record trims, but machines act on them differently, and commercial heads are far more willing to cut than a home machine is. A design that produced tidy connecting stitches on your Brother can come off a commercial machine with visible trim tails. This is worth a test run on scrap before a production batch.
Related conversions
Your file is used only for this conversion and deleted as soon as the download is ready. We keep no copy, and there is no account to store it in.