Oversized work
Splitting across panels
Artwork wider than the press gets tiled. Each panel is its own page with its own slice of the raster and its own cut: the silhouette on the outer edges, dead straight where it butts the neighbour.
6 min read
Panelling runs from the command line, not from the web app. There is no screen for it and no job in the app reaches it: it is run against the artwork directly.
You give it the finished size of the assembled piece and the width of your press, and it writes one page per panel plus an assembly map. Every panel carries the silhouette on its outer edges and a straight line where it meets the next one.
Two runs, and the first one writes nothing
Panelling is run for you from the command line rather than from a screen, and it is run twice. The first run measures: you give it the finished size and the width of your press, and it prints the plan and writes nothing at all. The second run writes the pages.
Ask for the plan first, always. It is the cheapest way to find out that a 250 cm piece on a 102 cm press is three panels, and where the seams are going to land, before anything is printed.
The sizes you give it
| Setting | Default | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Finished size | required | The finished size of the ASSEMBLED piece. Everything else derives from it, so there is no default — guessing would be guessing at the size of the job. |
| Press width | 102 cm | Your press's page width. |
| Press length | 0 | The press's page length. 0 means no limit, so the piece is split across the width only. |
| Seam bleed | 1.0 cm | Artwork printed past each seam and trimmed off. |
| Overlap | 0 | Finished artwork deliberately shared by both neighbours, for a lapped rather than a butt join. |
The artwork a panel can carry is the panel width LESS two seam bleeds, because the bleed is printed on the page and then trimmed away. A 102 cm press at 1 cm of bleed carries 100 cm of finished artwork per panel.
The straight seam is not drawn
This is what makes the joins close. The artwork is cropped at the seam BEFORE its outline is found, so the edge of the crop IS the seam — which means two neighbours cut the same line from opposite sides.
Drawing a straight line and hoping it met the silhouette would leave a step at every join. Seam bleed and why gaps happen goes further into it.
What comes out
One PDF per panel, named NAME_TAG_Hh_Wb.pdf so a pile of pages says which is which, plus an assembly CSV beside them. Everything else is the same as every other file here: the CutContour separation over CMYK, 3 pt stroke, round join and cap, overprint off, two named layers, and the page derived as artwork plus clearance with the width rounded up.
The assembly map has its own guide. A pile of panels with no map is a puzzle at the bench.
The rest of the settings
- Cut offset in millimetres. Negative pulls the cut inside the printed area, which is the safe direction.
- Page clearance is added in total on the assembly's OUTER edges, exactly as in the tracer.
- Flat bottom, Flat top, Flat left, Flat right square off an edge so the piece has something to stand on. Applied before the split, so the straight line is the same on every panel that touches it.
- Resolution floor is the px/cm floor below which a tight cut chases noise; the report carries a soft or fine verdict against it.
- Smallest hole here is square centimetres, NOT the fraction of the largest component the tracer means by the same name. So is Brightness limit: here a pixel is material when its darkest channel is at or below the number, which is the opposite sense to the tracer's distance from the sampled background.
Flat edges have a guide of their own, because the number they take is not the number people expect.
Got an oversized job coming?
Tell us the finished size and your press width.