How people use Ink/Stitch
This review lists what Ink/Stitch’s users make and ask for, with the roadmap step that covers each in StitchCraft. The most frequent come first, as far as the sources show. It was made on 2026-10-19 to look for major uses the roadmap lacked, after automatic digitizing of pictures turned out to be missing from it. It changed the roadmap in 4 places (changes).
Sources
- Ink/Stitch’s documentation and tutorials, at inkstitch.org: the workflow, the Params dialog, the tools, lettering, thread colours, troubleshooting, and import and export.
- Its release notes from v3.0.0 (2023) to v3.3.0 (July 2026), and its lettering web page, Ink/Stitch Create.
- Questions and answers in public, on Ink/Stitch’s GitHub issues and discussions, the Inkscape forum’s embroidery section and Reddit’s r/Machine_Embroidery, and the titles of tutorial videos and how-to articles.
No survey of Ink/Stitch’s users has published its results. The survey of December 2024 serves a doctoral thesis, and its answers are not public. So the order below is how often a use came up in these sources. It measures what people write about, which can differ from what they do most.
What people make
| Use | What the sources show | StitchCraft |
|---|---|---|
| Shapes drawn by hand, their stitches set one by one | Ink/Stitch’s basic use and workflow are to draw, set the stitches, and save a machine file. The Params dialog sets each element’s stitches, with a preview | M6’s effects in VectorCraft. Their dialogs show the parameters’ names alone until M6.10 labels and groups them, with the richer parameters VectorCraft 0.14 adopted |
| Pictures made into embroidery | The workflow’s way from a picture is Trace Bitmap, Simplify and Cleanup Document, with the stitches then set by hand. Tutorial videos trace a cartoon and text and logos. An article calls the result finicky (Machine Embroidery Geek). A traced logo showed yellow behind its black lettering and sewed too many stitches, and Ink/Stitch crashed when its letters were made satin (Inkscape forum). A logo 3 inches wide came out muddled, with its letters filled where satin was needed. Its owner then paid a digitizer 5 dollars (Reddit) | M13 (design) |
| Lettering in embroidery fonts | Lettering has a menu of its own, with lettering along a path and batch lettering for lists of names. The font library lists 93 fonts, each with the heights it sews at, and Ink/Stitch Create sets lettering on the web. The advice for small text is to use Ink/Stitch’s fonts (Reddit). Text typed in an installed font fails as a fill whose border crosses itself (Inkscape forum) | M14, before 1.0. Large text in any font, made into paths with Type › Create Outlines in VectorCraft, sews by M13’s rules |
| Patches and appliqué | Searches for tutorials find many patches, from a beginners’ guide to patch shapes with a merrow-like edge. Ink/Stitch has an appliqué tutorial and the E-stitch for appliqué | Fills, satin borders, the E-stitch and stops sew patches today. An appliqué tool with placement and tack-down lines stays after 1.0 |
| Fewer colour changes and a good order | The FAQ’s “Too many color changes” (help), and issues such as #1337, “Despite two colors I have 6 color changes”, and #378, “reorder by color”. The routing tutorial leaves the order to the user. Its tools restack elements and route satin columns and running stitches, and Jump to Stroke turns a jump into a running stitch | M13.3 orders automatic elements, and with --sort-colours any design. M10 has the routing tools |
| The colours of real threads | Thread palettes installed into Inkscape, and Apply Palette for the nearest thread. A guide from the City of San Diego picks Ink/Stitch’s Brother palette before anything is drawn | The nearest colour of the PEC palette (M1.6), stitch palette for tracing (M13.7), thread catalogues (M11) |
| Bought designs opened, resized or moved to a machine | Requests to open a PES file to enlarge it (#1716) or to shrink it (#2022). Ink/Stitch opens machine files as manual stitches, and its maintainers warn that scaling changes the density | stitch inspect, stitch preview and stitch convert (M2). Opening a machine file in VectorCraft is added after 1.0 |
| Designs larger than the hoop | Requests to split a design for a small hoop (#182, discussion 1341) | The hoop check (M1.3). Splitting stays after 1.0 |
| Checking a design before sewing | The simulator, realistic previews and a density map | VectorCraft’s previews (M6.3) and stitch preview |
| Worksheets for the machine’s operator | Print PDF, with the colour blocks, thread names and stitch counts | The report and the picture that stitch plan writes. Worksheets stay after 1.0 |
| Other stitch types | Ripple, contour, meander, circular, guided and gradient fills, tartan, cross stitch from pictures (v3.3.0), and tutorials on redwork, cutwork and free-standing lace | M7.6 to M7.9, and M10 |
What people struggle with
| Trouble | Sources | StitchCraft |
|---|---|---|
| Installing and starting Ink/Stitch, above all on macOS | Issues such as #4553, “v. 3.3.0 does not run on iMac/Sequoia”, and #600, “Ink/Stitch is greyed out in Inkscape”. A Params dialog and previews that never open (Inkscape forum) | The plug-ins are WebAssembly modules that VectorCraft loads, with no other program to install. Signed binaries come with 1.0 (M12) |
| Settings that are hard to choose | A reader found the Params settings hard to judge in advance (Machine Embroidery Geek). Another found Ink/Stitch “not beginner friendly” (Reddit) | M13 chooses the stitches, and VectorCraft previews them |
| Shapes that Ink/Stitch refuses | Fill: Shape is not valid for text and traced shapes whose borders cross (EduTechWiki) | A fill sews the region a viewer paints, crossings included (M5.1) |
| Long waits | An hour of “Rendering stitch-plan” on a complex drawing (discussion 1834) | Budgets bound every loop over input, and cargo xtask perf guards the time of the hoop’s whole field (NFR-PERF-1) |
| Small text that does not come out crisp | Lettering on a fill, in a logo 2 inches wide, on a PE800 (Inkscape forum) | M14’s fonts at the heights they sew at, and M13’s rules for fills under columns |
Changes to the roadmap
- M13, image to embroidery. It is new, and comes after M7.5 and before M7.6.
- M14, lettering. It moves from after 1.0 to after M8, whose SVG adapter reads the files of Ink/Stitch’s fonts. Its last steps set the text in a picture again as lettering.
- Colour sorting for any design.
--sort-coloursgives a design with settings the order of M13.3. It was after 1.0. - Machine files opened in VectorCraft. This is planned after 1.0.
stitch import design.pes -o design.vectorcraftwrites their stitches as manual stitches, with the same document writer as M8’sstitch import-inkstitch.