Vector files are artwork themselves. These files are brought in as
objects. The user must realize that graphics files contain objects with outline
weights (thickness) and all sorts of color properties that are inapplicable to
an embroidery design. As such, when importing vectors, the outline and its color
are all that are brought in. For some designs, this saves the user the work of
having to re-draw the image.
Vector images are outlines filled with color – think of a company logo, cartoon, comic or coloring book.
As vector images already have outlines in them, and embroidery objects have outlines too, it might seem reasonable that starting with a vector-based image is better for this purpose. You would have little to draw because the art is already there for you. Simply set the stitch properties and you’re done, right? Well, you can, and we do import them for that purpose, but…
…In actuality that is rarely the case.
Vector artists can do things with their objects, such as ‘overlapping,’ which makes embroidery of the outline completely impossible. Also the shapes can be directly adjacent, which will leave gaps in embroidery. And vector artists jump from color to color and back again very casually. You don’t want to attempt this with embroidery. So, while the allure of using vector files is there, it actually can take more work to make a vector-based image work for you than simply creating objects over top of a bitmap image.
Another common problem using vector based images is that of the original source. There are a lot of clipart companies in the world, and they offer their product in a variety of file formats. When an artist submits an image that was created as a bitmap, the company then uses a program to ‘auto-trace’ the outlines in the image so that you, the customer, can get your ‘vector’ version of it as an EMF or WMF or AI file, etc. Those files are almost universally the worst thing to use for the reason that they contain as many as one hundred times the number of outline nodes as needed, and they are often ‘line’ nodes which means the stitches that will be generated will have to stop at each node.
Given these inherent difficulties, Level 3 has added features that let you overcome these problems.
However, for all these reasons we suggest you always use a bitmap picture - .bmp, .jpeg, etc. That is unless you yourself are the artist or whoever is creating the vector files as the original format and have done so with embroidery design in mind.