Add designs and set the gap

Once the stock is chosen you are on the sheet. This is how you fill it.

Add a design

Press Add design and choose a file, or drop a file on the sheet. It appears with a pink line round it. That is the cut line, the line the cutter will follow. It is traced from the artwork wherever the picture has a shape. See Cut lines, kiss-cut and bleed.

A new design opens at 3″ on its longest edge, in the artwork's own proportions, unless your stock has a suggested size set. The list on the left names each design with its size and DPI, for example 3″ × 2.637″ · 300 DPI. The foot of the screen counts what you have: 2 designs · 2 pieces · 1 sheet.

Pictures with a transparent background cut best. A PDF or a JPEG has no transparency, so its cut line starts as the picture's rectangle.

Move things

• Drag a piece. The line above the sheet changes from Arranged automatically to Arranged by hand — re-pack. Studio never re-packs a sheet you arranged by hand behind your back. Press the re-pack control when you want it packed again.
• Undo is the left arrow beside in and mm at the top, or Ctrl+Z. It puts a dragged piece back.
• in or mm switches every length on screen between inches and millimetres.
• Choose several. Press on an empty part of the sheet and drag a box. Every piece the box reaches is marked, and the foot says how many are chosen. Hold Shift while dragging to add to the choice, Alt to take away, and press Escape to let the box go. A piece counts once the box reaches its cut line, not the square round it.
• Drag any chosen piece and they all move together, by exactly the same amount. They stop where the first would come closer to a neighbour than the cut gap. One Undo puts the whole group back.

Set the gap

Open the Job tab on the right and type a number into Gap between pieces. The pieces move apart, and the line under the sheet says, for example, 12 mm cut gap. The gap is the room the blade needs between pieces. The stock sets the smallest gap it allows, and a gap smaller than the blade can separate is a stop in the preflight.

Copies and filling the sheet

Each design has its own number of copies. On the Job tab, Fill the sheet — N sets the copies to the most that fit. N is Studio's own count from packing a sheet, not an estimate. The button disappears once the sheet is full, and it is not offered when there are two designs on the sheet, because Studio cannot know in what proportion you want them.

Nest by shape

Nest by shape is on by default. It packs the outline of each piece rather than the box round it, so a round sticker can sit in the corner of its neighbour. Under it Studio says what that saved in sheets, for example Saving 1 sheet — 2 by shape against 3 in rows, or that it made no difference, which on a square sticker it honestly often does.

Crop and straighten a picture

Select a design, open the Design tab and press Crop the picture. The editor opens with a box that has no fixed shape: drag a corner or an edge to crop, drag inside to move it, and Reset crop puts the whole picture back. Straighten turns the picture up to 15° either way. A crop throws picture away, and the line under the editor says what the print now is, including the DPI after the crop, because a crop to a third of a photograph prints it at a third of the resolution. Cancel goes back to the crop you opened on; Done keeps what is there.

Cropping the picture and shaping the cut line are different jobs and are never mixed. See Shape a cut line by hand.

What the preflight will say

Open the Preflight tab at any time. A picture printed under 150 DPI at its size is a look, and a design smaller than the cutter can cut is a stop. See Read the preflight.