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Preparing Artwork
The tool takes an image and places it on an artboard of the exact physical size of one enclosure side. It scales the image to fill that artboard. It does not crop, pad, rotate or otherwise interpret the artwork — what you give it is what gets printed. So the artwork has to be right before it comes in, and this page is about what "right" means.
The artwork must have the same aspect ratio as the side it is going on. Side A of a 1590B is 56 × 108.5 mm, so its artwork must be 56:108.5, whether that is 662 × 1282 pixels or 2000 × 3875.
Drift of up to 0.5% is tolerated and reported as a warning — the image is scaled to fill and the stretch is invisible. Anything beyond that is refused, because the artwork would be visibly distorted. A wrong shape is the most common problem, and it usually means the canvas was set up from a rounded number rather than the guide's size.
Set your canvas to the artboard's physical size in your editor (56 × 108.5 mm at 300 DPI or more) rather than picking a pixel count and hoping. Enclosure sizes lists every side.
Artwork must resolve to at least 300 DPI at the artboard's physical size. The tool does not want a specific pixel count; it wants enough pixels for the size. tayda-uv sides prints the minimum for each side:
tayda-uv sides 1590B
SIDE ARTBOARD MIN PIXELS @300DPI TOLERANCE
A 56 × 108.5 mm 662 × 1282 ±0.50 mm
B 52 × 24 mm 615 × 284 ±1.00 mm
C 24 × 103 mm 284 × 1217 ±1.00 mm
D 52 × 24 mm 615 × 284 ±1.00 mm
E 24 × 103 mm 284 × 1217 ±1.00 mm
Lid 56 × 108.5 mm 662 × 1282 ±1.00 mm
More is fine. Export at 600 DPI if your editor makes that easy; the PDF gets bigger and nothing else changes.
Tolerance is Tayda's printer registration accuracy for that side — how far the print may land from where the file puts it. It is not slack in the artboard size. Keep anything that must not be cut off at least that far from the edge, and keep the artboard itself exact.
Every artboard is listed in the orientation the Tayda guide uses: the face and lid are portrait, the ends are landscape, the long sides are portrait. If your artwork is the right shape but turned 90°, the tool warns that the image is landscape where the side is portrait (or vice versa) and then refuses it for the wrong aspect ratio. Rotate it in your editor.
The tool cannot tell which way is up. Check the finished PDF in a viewer.
Transparency matters when the white undercoat is on auto (the default): opaque pixels get white under them and transparent ones stay bare enclosure. A logo on a transparent background printed on a black enclosure comes out as the logo on black. Export PNGs with the alpha channel intact if that is what you want; flatten onto a background if it is not. White and gloss has the detail.
PNG, JPEG, GIF and SVG. PNG is the safe choice: lossless, with an alpha channel.
JPEG has no transparency, so -white auto floods the whole side; that is correct behaviour, not a bug. GIF is limited to 256 colours.
Artwork is converted from RGB to CMYK on the way through, and the PDF contains no RGB at all — Tayda's process requires that. Bright saturated blues, greens and oranges that only exist in RGB will come out duller, as they would from any CMYK printer. If a colour matters, order one enclosure first and look at it.
An SVG has no pixel size of its own, so the tool renders it for the side it is going on — at 600 DPI unless you pass -dpi — and from then on treats it as an ordinary image. The PDF holds pixels, not paths. Nothing is vectorised on the way through.
Rendering keeps the SVG's own proportions, so a drawing of the wrong shape is still reported as the wrong shape rather than quietly stretched to fit the artboard.
Two things to do before exporting, because both are refused rather than silently dropped:
- Convert text to paths. Text is not rendered. In Inkscape: Path → Object to Path. In Illustrator: Type → Create Outlines. In Affinity Designer: Layer → Convert to Curves.
- Flatten clipping paths, masks, filters, patterns and embedded images. None of these are rendered.
If an SVG uses any of them the tool stops and tells you which:
error: face.svg: this SVG uses features the renderer does not support, and rendering it anyway would
print artwork that differs from what you drew:
- text is not rendered: convert text to paths before exporting (in Inkscape, Path > Object to Path)
export a PNG at the size 'tayda-uv sides' lists if flattening is awkward
That is deliberate. Tayda prints the file as submitted, so an SVG that lost its lettering inside this tool would go unnoticed until the enclosure arrived. If flattening is a nuisance, export a PNG from your editor at the size tayda-uv sides lists and use that instead.
Unused definitions do not count: an orphan clipPath or pattern left behind in <defs> by an editor is fine as long as nothing references it.
Not supported. Export a PNG or SVG from the program that made them.