CutContour prepress

Artwork in.
Cut path out.

Drop in the file you were sent. Get back a print-ready PDF with the cut path on its own separation, the folds scored, and the size named the way your operator expects it.

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The single-file tuner: a traced leaf with the magenta cut path following its edge into every notch, and beside it the finished size, the preflight figures and the tuning controls — The tuner: the cut path over the artwork, and the controls that move it.

What it handles

Four jobs that used to mean an hour in Illustrator

Shapes

Rectangles, rounded corners, arch-top banners, circles. Scalloped edges with the wave depth and spacing you set.

Folds

Score lines on their own separation. Give a count, a spacing, or just the panel widths you quoted.

Silhouettes

Traced from the alpha channel, with the controls to shed a welded glow, drop detached specks and lose strands no blade could follow.

Oversized

Wider than the press? A command-line tool tiles it into panels that butt without a gap, each with its own page and an assembly map.

The part people get wrong

A cut path is not an outline

Trace the edge of a file and you get something that looks right on screen and cuts badly. A blade doesn't turn a corner the way a screen draws one, and a node every pixel is a path a cutter grinds through.

Every path comes out fitted, not sampled — the nodes sit where the shape actually turns, and how tightly they follow it is a millimetre tolerance you set. Smooth curves all the way round, never a chain of short straight steps.

How the fitting works

Check	What happens
Resolution	Flags artwork too coarse to hold a tight cut, before you spend time on it
Artwork and page	Both measured off the finished PDF, with the filename that follows from them
Paths	Counts the subpaths and how many close. Eight or more usually means specks
Existing cut	On a drawn shape, names a cut separation the artwork already carried so you don't ship two

Naming and sizing

Files come out named the way the floor expects

GIANNY_202h_102b.pdf
DIO_202h_172b.pdf
DESERT_P1of3_192h_103b.pdf

Height then width, both in centimetres, and both the page: artwork plus your clearance in total, with the width rounded up to the whole centimetre. Panelled jobs carry their position in the name.

The pattern is fixed rather than configurable — the tracer writes it and nothing in the app can change it — so every file that leaves matches. Nobody renames anything by hand.

The Recent jobs list: five finished files, each row giving the output name, the artwork it came from, the settings it was cut with, the page in centimetres and the effective resolution — Recent jobs, each carrying the settings it was cut with.

Try it on a file you already have

Upload something from last week's job bag and see what comes back.