Silhouettes
Cutting the gaps inside a shape
The gap between an arm and a body is background, so the tracer leaves it and the cutter leaves it as vinyl. Cutting those gaps is a separate pass that only ever adds to the path.
6 min read
The tracer traces the OUTER silhouette. Anything the artwork encloses — the gap between a trunk and a tusk, an arm and a waist, the counter of an O — is background, and it comes off the cutter still made of vinyl.
The hole pass finds those regions and adds them to the cut path as extra subpaths, wound the opposite way, so the cutter reads them as holes and offsets the blade inward.
It only ever adds
The holes are added to the cut path you already have, and the outer outline comes out exactly as it was traced — not re-fitted, not nudged. There is deliberately no option to redraw it: a hole is not a reason to move an outline a proof was approved against.
It runs after the layers have been added, on the file that step produced — the same shape of thing as the weeding box. A hole edge is found the same way the outer silhouette was, so the two agree on the same file.
It needs the original artwork
This is the part people get wrong. The finished cut file cannot answer the question. The tracer flattens the transparency over white, so by the time this runs, the thing that said what was background is gone — and brightness alone cannot tell an enclosed gap from a white part of the artwork. Pointed at a finished file, it will call the white of an eye a hole.
So the silhouette comes from the original artwork, given with Original artwork alongside the cut file. Without it the tool refuses rather than guessing. Going by brightness anyway is possible, and has to be asked for explicitly.
The original is cropped to its own silhouette first, so it lands on exactly the artwork already on the page. An original at different proportions is refused outright rather than putting every hole in the wrong place.
Measure before you cut
Plan only measures and prints and writes nothing. It is the first thing to run on a file you have not cut holes in before, because it tells you what would be cut and what would be refused.
The two numbers
| Setting | Default | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest hole | 2.0 cm² | Below this a hole is a speck, and weeding it costs more than leaving it. |
| Thinnest web | 0.3 cm | Refuse a hole whose surrounding material is thinner than this. It is the one that protects the job. |
Smallest hole here is an absolute area in square centimetres. In the tracer and in the weeding tool a setting of the same name means a fraction of the largest component instead. A figure copied from one to the other is silently wrong rather than loudly wrong, so check which is meant before reusing one.
Deciding whether a hole should be cut at all is a production call, and it has a guide of its own.
Settings that quietly do nothing
Every setting given in millimetres becomes a whole number of pixels of the traced artwork, and at a low resolution some of them round to none — 0.1 mm at 96 dpi is a third of a pixel. Rather than describe a setting the file never got, the report lists those separately as not applied, and says so on the way past.
Question about a specific file?
Send the artwork and what you expected the cut to do.