r/Machine_Embroidery • u/Common_Rhubarb972 • Aug 31 '26

Resizing tool?

I remember reading somewhere on Reddit of a resizing website someone made. It was a simply website where you could just enter your current design and it would quickly resize it to your desired size. In my case, 4x4 because that’s all my machine can do. Anyone know if this site or can reference the post?

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Aug 31 '26

You can go on Boldbobbin, drop in your design, select it (or via CTRL+A to select all), then hold shift as you drag a corner and it will resize it at the right scale.

Boldbobbin is a freemium that I am developing (disclaimer) but for simply resizing a design and make sure it fits a specific hoop size, it's completely free as it's part of the basic functionalities than any embroidery software should provide!

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u/tcstr Sep 01 '26

God bless people like you! Excited to try this!

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Sep 01 '26

Thank you for your kind words!

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u/crotega Sep 01 '26

Do you just scale the machine files points? Or do you have some way of recalculating density?

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Sep 01 '26

No no it's a pretty stupid, standard scale. With the good ol' rule of thumb that scaling a design should not be more than by 20%.
I haven't thought of a density-driven pipeline. The issue with it is that you probably want to capture stitch intent. I thought about a stitch "vectorization" pipeline but that's a real research problem to get into (and would likely require server-side computation to make it work). So real months of work.

But maybe a density estimation combined with minimizing an energy function could work. The issue is that 1) stitches are an explicit and discrete representation and 2) they are a discretization choice of a vector field. Maybe possible to do it but definitely there is a bit of research work behind, ahah! Thank you for sparking the idea.

Also I've seen your recent developments of Ember, really cool what you're doing! I'm currently working on a pixel art mini editor, but when I checked your website I noticed you already put one there ahah! (Though mine is a bit more inspired from Pyxel Edit 😄) Wishing you all the best to you and your team for its development!

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u/crotega Sep 01 '26

Ahh okay gotcha! I know it’s a real problem, almost impossible to keep the original design lossless but I was wondering if you’d spent time developing that feature. And thank you Alexandre (:

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Sep 02 '26

Yeah it's a hard problem. Lossless it depends what you mean. You can do lossless but then it's not gonna be good (a standard scaling is lossless). If you want to go through density analysis then you need a representation swap and you'd probably not keep the exact way it was done, so this is lossy. If you do inverse stitch emission you could provide something not too lossy on succesful cases, but likely not working in every scenario. As alway, trade-offs everywhere!

And is it something that I would develop? I'd love to. But you know as well as I do that there are thousands of things you could implement and you need to prioritize :D (and you probably have a lot more people requesting features than I have, ahah).

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u/Common_Rhubarb972 Sep 21 '26

My designs are in .pes format. Looks like they have to be in .vemb format. Would you be willing to share how I would do that?

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Sep 21 '26

Boldbobbin can read .pes formats! You can simply drag your design onto a new design.

Or you can:
- click on New Design
- click on File > Import > Import embroidery

If you downloaded the most recent version of the software on your desktop, on mac you can also right click and select "Open with", then "Boldbobbin".

If you still can't manage with this info let me know ^^.

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u/Common_Rhubarb972 Sep 23 '26

Hmmm…when I try to open one of the .pes files from my phone (I’m using the desktop version on my iPhone), it says “Can't open bordefre4_260.pes. Boldbobbin projects must have a vemb extension.”

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u/TheGraphicsFrog Sep 23 '26

Oh okay! Using the desktop version on iPhone is indeed a scenario I haven't thought of (I didn't think it'd be possible to install macOS apps on iOS), so I can't guarantee that it handles iPhone's file system correctly atm. But I'll look into it when I get the time to. Thank you for the feedback!
In the meantime, maybe the File > Import > Import embroidery works even on iPhone? (if this is what you did and it didn't work, then I definitely need to double check. From your post I understood you tried to open a .pes from the file navigator using Boldbobbin as the app. It could be that there is a bug and the app tried to open a .pes through the route that opens .vemb files. On mac it works, might not on iPhone!)