The two colour conventions, reading a die-line PDF, checking the blocks and exporting the DC job XML.
A customer sends a die-line PDF: the finished shape drawn as colored rules over the artwork. Someone then has to work out what the machine is being asked to do and build the job by hand, measuring positions off the page. The Die Line Reader does that reading for you — drop the PDF in, check what it found, and export the DC job XML.
There are two conventions in circulation and they contradict each other, so the reader has to know which one a file follows. It works this out on its own; the Color convention box shows what it decided and lets you overrule it.
Customer die line — what a print buyer's designer draws:
| Drawn as | Read as | On the machine |
|---|---|---|
| ■ Red or magenta | Cut / slit | The boundaries of the finished pieces. Lines down the sheet are slits, lines across it are cuts. |
| ■ Blue or cyan, dashed | Perforation | A perforation across or down a piece, with the tool you choose. |
| ■ Green, dashed | Crease | A crease across the sheet. |
Duplo DC template — the templates Duplo supplies, named like
648-B2-604/TableTent_12x18_2up:
| Drawn as | Read as | On the machine |
|---|---|---|
| ■ Cyan, solid | Cut / slit | Drawn as a closed rectangle around each finished block. |
| ■ Cyan, dashed | Perforation / score / slice | Pick the tool per line — Perf, Micro, Slice-Score or Score. |
| ■ Magenta, dash-dot | Crease | A crease across the sheet, at the depth you set. |
The two conventions above cover most files, but plenty of shops draw their dies their own way. The ⚙ Settings button sets the rules: one row each for Cut / slit, Perforation and Crease, and for each a color family and whether it counts when drawn solid, dashed, or either.
Faint lines at the bottom of the dialog sets how washed out a color may be before it is treated as artwork instead of a die line. The default keeps pale tint boxes out of the way. Lower it only if a die drawn in a tint is coming up empty.
A DC controller does not think in cut lines, it thinks in blocks. Where the cut lines close into rectangles the reader uses those directly — which is exactly what a Duplo template gives you, since it draws each finished block as a rectangle. That is the accurate answer and it is tried first.
When the cuts do not close — a die of bare slits and cuts running off the sheet — it falls back to reading the bands they divide the sheet into, and decides which are product by width: an outer band with the sheet edge on one side and a cut on the other is trim, and trim is always narrower than the pieces it is trimmed from. A sheet with a single cut down the middle and pieces running to the edges gives two equal bands, neither narrow, so both are kept — the right answer for that layout.
The panel says which method was used, and the block outlines are drawn on the preview, so you can see what it decided before you export rather than at the machine.
The same DuploDCJobTemplate the Imposer exports, so a file from here imports into the PC Controller
— and back into ImposeIQ — exactly like one produced by the rest of the suite. One CutBlock per
finished piece, in points, origin bottom-left.
Perforations are written relative to the piece they cross rather than to the sheet, which is how the controller addresses them: it repeats a single entry onto every matching block. Four identical perforations across a 2 × 2 layout therefore collapse to two entries, not eight — one per position on the piece.
Crease element carries a Y position and nothing
else, so it can only describe a crease running across the sheet. A crease drawn down the sheet is the slitter
module's score wheel on the machine, and the schema expresses that as a perforation with the Score tool, so that
is what it is exported as.Only straight lines square to the sheet. Any die line that is diagonal or curved is counted and reported in the panel rather than quietly left out of the export — if a shape needs a rotary die, you want to find that out while you are still looking at the file.
Perforations and creases that fall outside every finished piece are reported the same way. They are usually in the trim, but occasionally they mean the piece grid came out wrong, which is worth a second look.