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Tools · Prepress

Dieline warp

Customers send flat artwork. A printed lampshade is cut from a curved, fan-shaped blank, so the artwork has to be bent to that curve to come out straight once the shade is rolled. This tool does the bend in a few seconds, with no designer involved.

Try it: pick the sample pattern or the test grid, then change the edge text, turn on the die lines, or switch on geometry correction and watch the circle and square get pre-compensated so they look true once the shade is formed.

1 · Artwork
Flat artwork as received
2 · Settings
Output quality
Maker's mark on the bottom edge
Text size 7 pt
3 · Export

The full tool also exports proof PDFs, 600 dpi lossless production PDF and TIFF. Downloads work on the hosted site.

Rendering
Target 11.0 × 8.5 inReady
The job

A flat rectangle of artwork has to land on a curved, die-cut blank without stretching or clipping. Doing it by hand in a design app takes a skilled person a few minutes per file, every file.

How it works

For every pixel on the sheet, the tool works out where it sits on the die, maps it back into the flat artwork and samples it smoothly. Edge text is set along the curve, one letter at a time. Geometry correction pre-compensates the art so shapes keep their proportions once the blank is rolled into a shade.

What the full tool adds

A mode that cleans customer files that are already curved by detecting and removing guide lines, an edge-text-only mode, proof and production exports, and an unwarp for scans. All of it runs in the browser.