Silhouettes

Deciding when a hole shouldn't be cut

Just because a gap can be cut does not mean it should be. The material left around a hole is what decides, so thin or tiny gaps are refused even though hole cutting is on by default.

5 min read

A thin arm bridged at two points tears in transit. That failure is not recoverable: it happens on the cutter, or in the customer's hands, and either way the piece is scrap. So the question is not whether a gap exists, it is whether the material around it will survive being weeded and handled.

The web is the number

The web is the band of material surrounding a hole. Thinnest web refuses any hole whose surround is thinner than it, and it defaults to 3 mm rather than to zero, because the failure it prevents cannot be undone. Hole cutting can stay on by default because the unsafe gaps are the ones this setting keeps out.

A green tag carrying two enclosed gaps. The rounded window in the middle, labelled 93 cm², is cut: a magenta path rings it. The narrow slot near the top edge is labelled as not cut and carries no path at all. Beside them a magnified strip through the top edge shows the magenta cut running along the outside of the tag with the slot below it, and the band of green material left between the two marked as a web of 2.1 mm, refused. — Both are enclosed gaps and only one of them is cut. The slot leaves 2.1 mm of material between itself and the outer edge, under the 3 mm the setting will pass, and that strip is the part that tears.

If a hole you want is being skipped, that is the setting doing its job. Raising it is a decision about your material and your handling, not a bug.

How it is measured, and why that matters

Two details in the measurement stop it being useless.

It is measured a little way out from the hole edge rather than on it. Measured right on the edge, the answer is a single pixel every time, which protects nothing.
It is taken at the fifth percentile around the perimeter, not at the single thinnest point, so one ragged pixel does not condemn a hole a person would happily cut.

Growing a hole thins the web

A hole can be nudged outward into the artwork, the way a negative offset works on an outline. That takes material away from the surround, so the web has to be judged on what will actually be left.

So the web is judged on the hole as it will be cut, after any growing, not on the hole as it was found. What the report approves is what ends up on the material.

Small holes are not worth it

Below the minimum area — 2 cm² by default — a hole is a speck, and weeding it costs more time at the bench than leaving it costs in appearance. This is the cheaper of the two decisions: get it wrong and you have a slightly less clean piece, not a torn one.

Measure first

Plan only measures and writes nothing. Run it before you cut a shape you have not cut before, look at what it found and what it refused, and decide from that rather than from the finished file.

A weeding box is the other half of this conversation and often the better answer: it cuts a rectangle around the piece so the waste lifts as one sheet instead of being picked out of every notch. That one does run in the web app, as part of the trace.

When there is no hole to find

If a gap you can see is not being found at all, the artwork probably has no transparency there — the tool reads the original file's alpha, and a flattened source cannot distinguish an enclosed gap from white artwork. That is covered in cutting the gaps inside a shape.

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