How it works
You lay out the film. We print exactly that.
Gangly Tools hands you the same layout software used to prepare sheets for the press — pack gang sheets, prep halftone artwork, upscale soft files, and see whether your art will look good before anything hits film.
- 01
Bring the artwork in
Upload PNG, JPEG, WEBP, TIFF, GIF, AVIF or SVG, one at a time or a folder at once. Transparency is preserved as-is, because on DTF the transparent areas are the ones that don't get white underbase and don't get ink. If a file came in with a solid background it shouldn't have, background removal is built in.
- Vector SVG is rasterised at export resolution, not at upload
- Original files are kept, so re-exporting at a higher DPI is lossless
- Per-image adjustments: gamma, brightness, contrast, saturation
- 02
Work in printed inches
Every size in the builder is the physical size that will come off the roll. Type 11.5 into the width field and the design prints 11.5 inches wide. Rulers run along both edges, snapping catches piece edges and centres, and alignment and distribution work across any selection.
- Units switch between inches, millimetres and centimetres
- Aspect ratio lock, rotation, flip, and crop with live DPI feedback
- Overlap detection flags pieces that would fuse together on film
- 03
Check the resolution honestly
Effective DPI is source pixels divided by printed inches — measured on whichever axis is weaker, because that is the one that shows. Crop a design to a quarter of its area and print it the same size and you have halved its DPI; the builder accounts for that, which is precisely the case that catches people out.
- Optimal at 300 DPI and above
- Good from 250, acceptable in most apparel work
- Bad from 200 — visibly soft on a shirt
- Terrible below 200 — the builder will keep telling you so
- 04
Nest the sheet
Gangly's nesting engine uses a priority-based layout model, working in integer thousandths of an inch so rounding can never place two pieces a hair inside each other. It ranks pieces by size, scores each open gap for the best fit, tries a 90° rotation where you allow it, then compacts the whole layout upward to reclaim any length left at the bottom.
- Tight mode packs freely; rows mode keeps a tidy grid for cutting
- Rotation is per-piece, so directional artwork stays upright
- Anything that will not fit is reported, never silently dropped
- 05
Export print-ready
Output is pixel-snapped: the canvas is exactly inches × DPI and every piece lands on an integer pixel, so there are no half-pixel seams along an edge. Export PDF, PNG, TIFF or JPEG for your own RIP.
- PDF, PNG, TIFF or JPEG at a resolution you choose
- Optional white underbase separation, with an adjustable choke
- Traced cut paths for pieces that need contour cutting
About
This started as our own production tool.
It was written to prepare sheets for our own press, which is why it looks like a piece of software and not like a shop page. The people using it were arranging film all day, so it grew rulers, snapping, keyboard shortcuts, an undo stack and a status bar that never stops telling you how much of the sheet you have used.
What kept coming up was that customers wanted to make those decisions themselves. They knew which of their designs could be shrunk a quarter inch to save a row, and which absolutely could not be rotated. Handing over the tool was simpler than building a worse version of it for the front end.
So the builder and the standalone tools are one program. Halftone and upscale hand off to a gang sheet when you are ready — nothing is a mock-up of the production layout, it is the production layout.
What that buys you
No surprise re-arranging
Your layout is the print file. Nobody re-nests it after you order.
No surprise rotations
Directional artwork stays the way you left it unless you allow rotation.
No surprise soft prints
If something was under 300 DPI, you saw it flagged before you paid.
No surprise sheet sizes
You choose the roll width and the length, from a desktop 12 inch up to a 60 inch wide-format roll.
Vocabulary
The terms, defined once.
If you already print, skip this. If you're selling shirts and outsourcing the printing, it is the whole vocabulary you need to order well.
- Gang sheet
- One large sheet of transfer film carrying many unrelated designs at once. You pay for the film, so the more designs you fit on a length of it, the less each one costs.
- DTF
- Direct-to-film. Artwork is printed onto a PET film with a white ink underbase, dusted with adhesive powder, cured, and then heat-pressed onto the garment.
- Underbase
- The white ink layer printed beneath the colour so the design stays opaque on dark fabric. Choking it in slightly hides any misregistration as a hairline rather than a white halo.
- Linear inch
- Film comes off a roll of fixed width, so cost tracks the length pulled off it. Twenty-two inches of unused width at the bottom of your sheet still costs the same as twenty-two used ones.
- Effective DPI
- Source pixels per printed inch, after any crop and at the final printed size. It is the number that predicts whether an edge looks crisp, and it is not the DPI written in the file's metadata.
- Cut path
- A traced outline around a design, used when the transfer is contour-cut rather than trimmed by hand. Exported as its own layer.
Easiest way to understand it is to pack one.
The builder opens on an empty 22 × 36 sheet. Drop a few designs on it and hit auto-nest.