Cutpeek

About

About Cutpeek

A small, independent tool for getting designs out of Silhouette Studio files.

Who makes it

Cutpeek is made by ALGD LTD, a company registered in Northern Ireland (NI744090). Email hello@cutpeek.com. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Silhouette America, Inc.

How it reads .studio3 files

Silhouette doesn't publish the .studio3 format. Cutpeek's reader was written for Cutpeek from public notes on the format, chiefly the reverse-engineered specification in the open-source studio3svg project by Zayd Mulani (MIT licence), plus our own study of files saved by Silhouette Studio 5, such as how colours and layer names are stored. No code was copied from studio3svg or from Silhouette Studio.

It has been tested against 197 real .studio3 files saved by Silhouette Studio 5.0, published under the MIT licence by Alan Cha's silhouette-card-maker, whose own layout data gives the true size of every shape. Those files are mostly rectangles with rounded corners and a little text, so other kinds of design have had less testing. If a file doesn't convert the way you expect, Silhouette Studio is the reliable fallback.

Cutpeek doesn't unlock protected or encrypted files and never will.

How it writes .studio3 files (beta)

The SVG to .studio3 converter is file-format interoperability: it writes your shapes into the layout Silhouette Studio 5 itself uses, so the free edition can open them. It doesn't touch, imitate or get around any licence check, activation or Design Store protection, and it doesn't change Silhouette Studio. The parts of a .studio3 document that don't depend on your design (page setup, cut settings, layer records) are taken from one of the MIT-licensed card templates by Alan Cha, saved by Silhouette Studio 5.0.402; everything that depends on your design is written by Cutpeek. No converted file has yet been confirmed in Silhouette Studio, which is why it is labelled beta.

Licences

  • Fonts: Bricolage Grotesque and Figtree, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, self-hosted. The full licence texts are in licences.txt.
  • Format notes: studio3svg SPEC.md, MIT licence, copyright (c) 2026 Zayd Mulani. Used as documentation; its notice is in licences.txt.
  • Test files: silhouette-card-maker cutting templates, MIT licence, copyright (c) 2025 Alan Cha. They aren't served on this site, except that the .studio3 writer carries the design-independent parts of one of them (a4-poker-v3.studio3) as its template; the notice is in licences.txt.