Questions people ask before their first sheet.

PNG, JPEG, WEBP, TIFF, GIF, AVIF and SVG. PNG with a transparent background is the ideal case for DTF — transparency is what tells the printer where not to lay white ink. SVG is kept as vector and rasterised at your chosen export resolution, so it stays sharp at any size.

Yes, and it is the most common one. A white background will print as a white rectangle around your design. There is background removal built into the upload panel for photographic and near-solid backgrounds, but a properly cut-out PNG from your design software will always beat an automatic removal.

Enough pixels that the design still hits 300 DPI at the size you are printing it. A design printed 10 inches wide wants about 3000 pixels of width. You do not have to work this out — the builder reports the effective DPI of every piece at its current size, and warns you the moment you scale something past its limit.

No. The DPI field stored in a file’s metadata is just a note about intended size; it does not change how many pixels the file has. What matters is pixels divided by printed inches, which is what the builder shows. A 3000 pixel image tagged “72 DPI” is still perfectly good at 10 inches wide.

Gangly uses a priority-based nesting model: it places the largest pieces first, scores each gap for the best fit, tries each piece in a rotated orientation where rotation is allowed, and compacts the layout upward to reclaim slack. On a mixed sheet of realistic apparel sizes it typically fills better than laying pieces out by eye, mostly because it will slot a small piece into a gap you would not have noticed.

Yes — rotation is a per-piece permission. Text, logos with a direction, and anything with a defined top should have it off. The nesting engine will work around them.

Roll widths from 8.5 up to 60 inches, with presets for the common ones — 22 × 36, 22 × 120 and 22 × 288 among them. 22 inches is the most common roll width in DTF and is a reasonable default if you are unsure. Length is yours to set.

Auto-nest tells you which pieces it could not place instead of quietly dropping them or shrinking them. You can lengthen the sheet, resize the piece, or move it to a second sheet.

The builder keeps a configurable gap between pieces and flags any two that actually overlap. A small gap makes the transfers easier to separate by hand; a larger one costs film. If you are cutting with a plotter, use the traced cut paths and leave room for the blade.

Free includes one file export — use every tool and pack real sheets before you pay anything. After that, Pro is $9/month for unlimited exports across the sheet builder, halftone, and upscale tools. Annual billing is $97/yr (10% off).

No. After your one free export, Gangly Tools is a flat $9/month for unlimited exports on your own production — we are not taking a percentage of your orders. Customer storefront and checkout tools are planned for a later release.

Yes. Create a free account to use the sheet builder, halftone, and upscale tools. Your first file export is included — after that, Pro is $9/month for unlimited exports. Sign in or register.

Yes — that is the primary use case. Export to PDF, PNG, TIFF or JPEG at the resolution you want, with an optional white underbase separation and cut paths. Gangly Tools is built for shops running their own press.

DTF lays white ink beneath the colour so the design stays opaque on dark garments. If we are printing your sheet, this is handled for you. If you are exporting to run on your own machine, the builder can output the white layer as its own separation — greyscale or solid — with an adjustable choke that pulls the white in a thousandth or two from the edge, so that any slight misregistration during transfer reads as a hairline rather than a white halo.

The export canvas is exactly inches × DPI and every piece is placed on an integer pixel boundary, so nothing lands on a half pixel and picks up a soft seam along one edge. Layouts are computed in integer thousandths of an inch rather than floats, because accumulated rounding error is how two designs end up fused together on film.

Follow the temperature, time and pressure your film and powder supplier specifies — it varies by film. As a general shape: press, peel per the film’s hot or cold instruction, then a short second press with parchment to set the finish. We include the specifics for the film we print on with every order.

Production and shipping times are being finalised alongside pricing. We will publish concrete numbers here rather than an optimistic range we cannot hold to.