I found some descriptions of additional embroidery formats on the web: Janome’s SEW, which is a simplified JEF format (actually its predecessor), Melco’s EXP and Tajima’s DST: Both are mainly used for industrial embroidery machines and don’t hold any color information.
Both plugins (StitchBuddy-QL and StitchBuddy-MD) are updated to read this formats.
I rewrote all code to support more file formats and enable future enhancements, now it’s a kind of embroidery framework I’ll use for upcoming applications. The first steps are releases of StitchBuddy-QL and StitchBuddy-MD to preview PES and JEF embroidery files in the Finder and search for them with Spotlight.
After JEFview’s release a lot of people asked me to support more file formats. The highest demand was for Brother’s PES. Now I duplicated the code of JEFview, wrote a new import routine for PES files and PESviewQL is released. Not a way to cover multiple file formats, but a first step in this direction. PESviewQL can be downloaded and used for free.
I messed up the bundle identifier in info.plist, which might cause collisions: corrected.
Now JEFview will provide better error descriptions if a file could not be read (to be checked with Console.app).
My wife bought a Janome MC350E last year and started to collect embroidery files. It’s easy to transfer them from her Apple iBook to the embroidery machine as the Janome supports USB memory sticks: Just plug the stick into the iBook, copy JEF files into the right folder and you’re done. Unfortunately previewing designs isn’t that easy: Although the touchscreen of the Janome shows thumbnail images, there’s no way to identify designs in the Finder of Mac OS X.
