( IN ALPHA DEVELOPMENT: NOT READY FOR SERIOUS USE. )

Embroidermodder is a free machine embroidery software program. The newest version, Embroidermodder 2 can:

• edit and create embroidery designs
• estimate the amount of thread and machine time needed to stitch a design
• convert embroidery files to a variety of formats
• upscale or downscale designs
• run on Windows, Mac and Linux

For more in-depth information, see our website and get the manuals here.

To try out the software in alpha see our current alpha pre-release.

Various sample embroidery design files can be found in the src/samples folder.

Embroidermodder is developed by The Embroidermodder Team which is maintained as a list on the website under "Credits".

If you use multiple operating systems, it's important to choose software that works on all of them.

Embroidermodder 2 runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Let's not forget the Raspberry Pi.

(This feature is currently broken.)

It is important to be able to visualize what a design will look like when stitched and our pseudo ``3D'' realistic rendering helps achieve this.

Realistic rendering sample #1:

Realistic rendering sample #2:

Realistic rendering sample #3:

Various grid types and auto-adjusting rulers

Making use of the automatically adjusting ruler in conjunction with the grid will ensure your design is properly sized and fits within your embroidery hoop area.

Use rectangular, circular or isometric grids to construct your masterpiece!

Multiple grids and rulers in action:

Taking measurements is a critical part of creating great designs. Whether you are designing mission critical embroidered space suits for NASA or some other far out design for your next meet-up, you will have precise measurement tools at your command to make it happen. You can locate individual points or find distances between any 2 points anywhere in the design!

Take quick and accurate measurements:

Need to make company apparel for all of your employees with individual names on them? No sweat. Just simply add text to your existing design or create one from scratch, quickly and easily. Didn't get it the right size or made a typo? No problem. Just select the text and update it with the property editor.

Add text and adjust its properties quickly:

Embroidery machines all accept different formats. There are so many formats available that it can sometimes be confusing whether a design will work with your machine.

Embroidermodder 2 supports a wide variety of embroidery formats as well as several vector formats, such as SVG and DXF. This allows you to worry less about which designs you can use.

(Currently this being ported to the embroider command line program.)

Need to send a client several different formats? Just use libembroidery-convert, our command line utility which supports batch file conversion.

There are a multitude of formats to choose from:

The GUI works by emitting internal text commands, so if you want to alter or add features to the program that aren't as low level as these commands then you can chain them together in simple scripts. This allows more control over the program than the GUI can offer.

A (no longer current) Embroidermodder 2 command excerpt:

To build Embroidermodder 2 from source you will need at least the Embroidermodder 2 source code itself, a build environment including CMake and Qt (version >= 6.0). For advice on how to get these, see the following subsections.

You will also need the git submodules, which can be collected by running these lines from the embroidermodder source directory:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Optionally, you may want to add:

• KDE for thumbnailer
• Valgrind for debugging

The Qt, KDE and Valgrind build dependencies can be installed easily by opening a terminal and issuing these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qt6-base-dev libqt6gui6 libqt6widgets6 libqt6printsupport6 libqt6core6 libgl-dev libglx-dev libopengl-dev

TODO: This is outdated advice.

The Qt, KDE and Valgrind build dependencies can be installed easily by opening a terminal and issuing this command:

sudo yum install git gdb gcc-c++ qt-devel kdelibs-devel valgrind

On Windows, we recommend doing the same as Debian/Ubuntu in WSL although other options like Cygwin and MSYS2 are available.

Our behind-the-scenes Windows build uses Python to get the Qt libraries like this.

If you want to do this some other way, like in an IDE, run these installers (not recommended):

• CMake: https://cmake.org/download/#latest
• Qt: https://www.qt-project.org
• Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
• Some version of MinGW for gcc:` https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/
• Git Bash: https://gitforwindows.org/
• A backend for CMake like Ninja: https://ninja-build.org/

On all systems with Bash, the following should work:

bash build.sh

If your system does not have bash, it may still run as sh. Failing that, try typing each line in in turn like this:

git submodule init
git submodule update

cmake -S . -B"build" -G"Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Debug"
cd build
cp -r ../assets/* .
cmake --build .
cat build.log
cd ..

After building as above, run your own development copy with:

cd build
./embroidermodder2

If you have no luck with the above advice and still want to run the development alpha, try reading the build.log in your build/ folder like this:

cat build/build.log

If, after googling keywords from the errors you're still stuck post and issue on GitHub here: https://github.com/Embroidermodder/Embroidermodder/issues and supply the build.log file. If something comes up a lot then we can add advice here.

During the alpha phase we mainly need to focus on getting the C bedrock of this project stable before letting more people put their creations into it. In Beta, non-programming related contributions will be wecomed to the website and reference manual repositories.

Anyone interested in changing Embroidermodder or becoming a contributor should go read our manuals, make issues and submit patches as you find them because the project is very weak here. It will also serve as training for submitting patches to the actual source code where changes are harder to critique and revise.

As for helping with specific bugs submitting an issue on GitHub along with the debug-####.txt file generated during your test run would be the best approach. For longer term techniques see the next section.

Long term we hope to develop a formalised bug hunting approach that involves writing a script of actions that are passed to the program using various builds on different machines to prove that the software is sound. This will likely be a task run on GitHub Actions (or another similar service) which will require some kind of human assessment of what new issues we have with the active development branch. For an early version, look at the test action and coverage_test_script string table.