PES — Brother / Babylock Embroidery File
Open BetabetaPES is the de-facto standard of home and hobby embroidery: the native format of Brother machines and compatible Babylock and Bernina. Its key difference from Tajima DST is embedded thread colors right inside the file, so the machine itself prompts which thread to load. On osm2cdr.ru a map is translated into embroidery with a running stitch along its lines: roads, water, greenery and building outlines are traced over the geometry. It is an honest baseline for personalized gifts and refinement in PE-Design or Ink/Stitch, not a production-ready satin-fill design.
Key Features
About PES Format
PES is the format of Brother embroidery machines, as well as compatible Babylock and newer Bernina ones. What sets it apart from the industrial Tajima DST is that thread colours are written right into the file: the machine itself shows which thread to load for each block, and a separate colour chart is not needed.
A city map in embroidery is a gift and a souvenir: a blanket, a pillowcase, a hoodie, children's clothes, a framed panel with the place you met or your home address. The export saves you the most tedious part — tracing streets and outlines by hand in an embroidery editor.
The exporter turns the map geometry into a running stitch along the lines: roads, water, green areas and building outlines are sewn along their own paths, thread colour is assigned by layer type, and long stretches are broken into stitches within the hardware limit of 12.1 mm. The size is fitted to the chosen hoop (4x4, 5x7 or 6x10 inches) with margins.
Let us be honest: this is a working blank, not a finished production design. There is no satin fill here, no underlay beneath dense areas and no manual optimization of jumps — those are added in PE-Design or Ink/Stitch, after which a test stitch-out on a scrap is a must.
What Program Opens PES Files
The following programs and applications can open, edit, and work with PES — Brother / Babylock Embroidery File (.pes) files exported from OSM2CDR:
Format specifications
- Proprietary format
- 2D only
- Lossless (no quality loss)
- No attributes
- Output: 1 file
- A Brother PES embroidery file with embedded RGB thread colors and a running stitch along map lines; segments within the 12.1 mm limit, auto-scaled to the hoop.
Who Uses PES Maps
How to Export PES
How to Open After Export
- A Brother embroidery machine (PE800, SE-1900, PE900 and others) — write the .pes onto a USB drive, plug it into the machine and pick the design; the machine shows the thread colours itself.
- Brother PE-Design — open the blank and refine it: change the stitching order, replace colours, add fills and text, remove small objects you do not need.
- Inkscape with the Ink/Stitch extension (free) — the same scenario without buying PE-Design: editing paths, simulating the stitch-out, exporting back into PES.
- Embrilliance, Embird or SewWhat-Pro — viewing, resizing for other hoops and converting into the formats of other machines.
- A test stitch-out on a scrap of the same fabric with stabilizer — a mandatory step before embroidering on the item itself: at a small scale the dense parts of a map behave differently than on screen.
Popular maps in PES
Get PES — Brother / Babylock Embroidery File map exports
Download professional PES maps from OpenStreetMap. Instant generation, any area.