The following comments refer to what's commonly referred to has home embroidery software, as opposed to commercial software. The line between them isn't clear. I've heard of Millenium professional software, but am not familiar with Millenium sewing/embroidery machine.

Actually, there are at least five different ways to embroider text.

1) Some embroidery software programs, such as Brothers PE Design and Bernina's Artista can create text directly using installed Truetype fonts (Note that ONLY Truetype fonts can be used; such programs effectively do their own rendering and can only process truetype fonts).

2) Some embroidery programs include a number of built-in typstyles.

3) Some embroider programs use stand-alone (usually overpriced) proprietary fonts. These include Embird and Viking/Pfaff software.

4) You can always use pre-built designs; these are designs in the shapes of letters or words.

5) Just about all embroidery sewing machines themselves have a number of built-in typefaces

In addition, there is software available, such as the Husqvarna Viking suite, that can convert PC Truetype fonts to a set of separate designs (item 4 above) or to its own proprietary format (item 3 above)

My own terminology choice in embroidery is to use

"embroidery alphabet" for a set of letter-shaped designs,
"embroidery font" for a proprietary font usable with specific embroidery software

However, this is far from the norm; just as graphical alphabets, such as those found on scrapbooking sites, are often referred to as "fonts".

- Herb

Thanks Herb. You are correct, the software is called Millennium. The actual machines are made by an Asian company named Happy, which I always thought was pretty hilarious considering the average mood of the people running the machines.

Here's Millenium's page on using TrueType fonts:

http://www.embroidery-machine-software.com/lettering_true_type.html

As I read it, the program (or at least Millenium III) can use truetype fonts. It creates its own internal format and saves it for future use. It can use any font that's available on the host system. If you want your service provider to use fonts that they don't have installed, you would only have to provide him with the fonts, paying due attention to the licensing rights and probably purchasing the font(s) for them. For many reasons, they may be averse to installing anything beyond what they already have.

- Herb

Emboidery stitches provide a matrix (“elongated pixels”?) which could be used as the basis for a type design.
I’ve never designed an embroidery font, but I did once design a fashion label logo that leveraged the medium:

Nice.

hhp

Here's an image of a font I acquired somewhere along the line - not sure whence it came or its provenance:

it's stitched Helvetica!

Nick, that's awesome!!

n.

Good work ! I am the honor of Outback Embroidery company and i am providing beautiful designs of embroidery, if you want more designs of it so visit site and get.