Tajima Format - tspilman@dalcoathletic.com
Dalco Athletic Lettering
12/16/1996 – Created initial document and findings of the Tajima format.
11/12/1998 – Revised findings to fix some errors in our interpretation of the format. Mostly I incorrectly reported ASCII 2D as
the delimiter of the format.
The Header
The header seems to contain information about the design. Seems to be ASCII text delimited by 0x0D (carriage returns).
This must be in the file for most new software or hardware to consider it a good file! This is much more important than I originally
believed. The header is 125 bytes in length and padded out by 0x20 to 512 bytes total. Here’s an example…
I’m also including an imbedded copy of the sample file for easy reference. Here’s a breakdown of the parts of the header
we know and don’t know. All entries in the header seem to be 2 ASCII characters followed by a colon, then it’s value trailed by a
carriage return. First is the ‘LA’ entry, which is the design name with no path or extension information. The blank is 16 characters
in total, but the name must not be longer that 8 characters and padded out with 0x20. Next is the stitch count ST, this is a 7 digit
number padded by leading zeros. This is the total stitch count including color changes, jumps, nups, and special records. Next, is
CO or colors, a 3 digit number padded by leading zeros. This is the number of color change records in the file. Next is +X or the
positive X extent in centimeters, a 5 digit non-decimal number padded by leading zeros. Following is the -X or the negative X
extent in millimeters, a 5 digit non-decimal number padded by leading zeros. Again, the +Y and –Y extents. Next is AX, AY,
MX, MY, and PD. I didn’t have any clue what these were, but a really cool support guy at Brother cleared it up for me…
AX and AY should express the relative coordinates of the last point from the start point in 0.1 mm. If the start and last points are
the same, the coordinates are (0,0) MX and MY should express coordinates of the last point of the previous file for a multi-
volume design. A multi-volume design means a design consisted of two or more files. This was used for huge designs that can
not be stored in a single paper tape roll. It is not used so much (almost never) nowadays. PD is also storing some information
for multi-volume design.
