v1.0-alpha
(Under construction, please wait for v1.0 release.)
Build status
Copyright (c) 2018-2025 The Embroidermodder Team and Josh Varga
https://www.libembroidery.org

Libembroidery is a low-level library for reading, writing, and altering digital embroidery files in C. It is implemented in a single-file so you can add it to your project by dropping embroidery.h in your source code. It is part of the Embroidermodder Project for open source machine embroidery.

Libembroidery is the underlying library that is used by Embroidermodder 2 and is developed by The Embroidermodder Team. A full list of contributors to the project is maintained in the Embroidermodder 2 github in the file CREDITS.md. It handles over 45 different embroidery specific formats as well as several non-embroidery specific vector formats.

It also includes a CLI called sew that allows for better automation of changes to embroidery files and will be more up-to date than the Embroidermodder 2 GUI.

For basic usage, the sew command line program should have some in-built help starting with:

    $ sew --help

If you need libembroidery for any non-trivial usage the source code is ordered in literate program style

Libembroidery is distributed under the permissive zlib licence, see the LICENCE file. You are not required to supply this file in your source code when adding the library but you are required to keep the license message in the comment within embroidery.h in place as it clarifies the same rights.

libembroidery and EmbroiderModder 2 use CMake builds so if you are building the project to use as a library we recommend you run:

git clone https://github.com/Embroidermodder/libembroidery
cd libembroidery
cmake .
cmake --build .
cmake --install .

This builds both the static and shared versions of the library as well as the command line program embroider.

On building the software, enter your build directory and type:

$ sew --test

for a suite basic diagnostics on your system.

The full suite requires that you have imagemagick installed to fully test the more image-processing based tasks, as does sew generally.