Embroidery fonts vs printing fonts

Embroidery fonts vs printing fonts

This article is for Embroidery Web API customers and developers, especially those with a printing or graphics background. In printing, fonts are just shapes – easy to scale, resize, or modify because they are made of vectors and pixels. Embroidery is different. Fonts here are made of stitches placed into fabric, and this introduces physical and technical limitations. Things like stitch length, density, fabric strength, and machine capabilities all affect the final result. If these differences aren't considered in your API calls, you could:

  • Produce embroidery that looks poor in quality.
  • Cause excessive trims or needle penetrations.
  • Increase production time and costs.

The article explains how embroidery fonts behave compared to printing fonts, and what rules developers should apply when building API calls that involve text scaling or lettering.

Scaling embroidery fonts

Embroidery fonts in the API are manually digitized for quality. Each font has a recommended minimum and maximum size. See Standard Fonts.

Going outside these limits produces poor results. Let’s see what happens if we scale the letters below the recommended minimum size – for example, down to 3mm:


  1. Too small – e.g. 3mm: Stitches are too dense, design looks messy.
  2. Too large – e.g. 60mm: Stitches can’t span wide areas. 

Wilcom software applies AutoSplit to break long stitches into smaller ones, but quality drops.

 

  1. Most machines support max stitches of ~12.5mm. Satin stitches used for lettering work best under 7mm width.
  2. Sharp corners like in the letter 'e': Automatic Shortening reduces extra needle penetrations to avoid fabric damage.

Closest point connection & trimming

Letters are usually connected by closest point connection – the software chooses the shortest path from one letter to the next. If letters are scaled too large, the gap between them grows, and the connecting stitch becomes visible.

In this case, automatic thread trimming is activated:
  1. The thread is cut when the gap exceeds a set limit – e.g. 2mm.
  2. Each trim costs time – ~70 stitches of machine runtime.
  3. Expert digitizers aim to minimize trims to reduce production costs.

Key points

When allowing website visitors to scale text or designs through the API:
  1. Enforce min/max size limits defined by Wilcom for each font.
  2. Remember: what looks fine in printing may not work in embroidery.
  3. Poor size handling can lead to bad stitch quality, visible trims, and wasted production time.


Info
For more details, contact support@wilcom.com
  1. Lettering
  2. Simple lettering
  3. Lettering objects

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