Design Shop Question

[GailForce Designs]

Hello
We're thinking of purchasing the Amaya XT for our embroidery company. We were very happy with the demo and information we recieved about the machine. We also were given a demo of design shop pro. I don't know if it was the person giving the demo but we weren't impressed. The person was nice he just didn't seem confident on the info.

Our question is how good is Design Shop Pro with digitizing? Does the Amaya XT work with other third party programs? How well does it work with Illustrator files and vectors?

Thanks for the help
Peter

[Russell Silva]

Hi Peter,

Just curious, what show did you receive this information at?

[levelbest]

Design Shop is actually a VERY powerful program and I wouldn't be without it. Of course since it's from Melco, it plays great with the OS. You can import vector designs from Illustrator or Corel. You may however need to save as a previous version file in Illustrator to get the import to work. We've had plenty of sucess working with both programs in conjunction with Design shop.

Could have been a sales person rather than a trainer doing the demo...

Best thing for you would be to find someone near where you are that owns Design Shop and sit for an hour or so and watch them work [img]smile.gif[/img]

[oldkush]

Peter

DesignShop Pro is one of the better digitizing programs and certainly can fill your design needs.

Now having said that, embroidery software is a tool and is only going to be as good as the person using it. The users embroidery knowledge, experience, skill, talent and their ability to get the most out of the software will make the biggest difference in the quality of work produced .... not the brand of software used.

Quality digitizing has a pretty steep learning curve and although having the ability to import vector files to create a design [or portions of one] can be a useful tool, it certainly is not a substitute for having the ability to manually create an embroidery design. Digitizing is not a "click a button or two and you are done" process.

When choosing digitizing software, you are free to choose virtually any program you choose .... you do not have to use the software that the machine dealer sells. In the end, choose the program[s] which you feel most comfortable using.

Bob

[Jeff]

Hi Peter,

As I have not seen answers to your question about Design Shop digitizing, I felt I should jump in.

Design Shop Pro+ is vector based. It is actually optimized to work with Adobe Illustrator. What I mean by optimized is that a copy and paste directly back and forth between the 2 programs is possible. If stitches have already been applied to some or all of the vector shapes in Design Shop, and the design copied and pasted to Illustrator and then changes made, and pasted back to Design Shop, the stitches are still there. Stitch Data is treated like vector data back and forth. If all objects in an embroidery file are selected, then copied and pasted into Illustrator, the vector objects can be edited, added to etc, then pasted back into Design Shop Pro+ and stitches will be applied to these edited or added pieces. If the file is saved out of Design Shop Pro+ as an EPS file, it can be opened in Illustrator, edited etc, then saved and re-opened in Design Shop and it will open as all embroidery files with stitches etc. This is a feature that only works with Illustrator and not Corel Draw or other vector programs.

Jeff Banks
Melco Embroidery Systems