How the reading is produced

Curveprint calculates the geometric and process relationship between a piece of artwork and each carrier: print-area proportions, the distortion a curved surface introduces, what is occluded or cropped, and the finest stroke that survives the process in question.

This is not a prediction about any particular printer. The actual equipment, the colour management, and the size differences between brands of the same product all change the outcome, and none of them is knowable from your file. Every reading says so explicitly rather than leaving it implied.

The carrier table is local data. Print areas, the 82 mm diameter, the 257.6 mm circumference, the 302° printed band, the 58° handle gap and the 120° visible arc are measurements. Nothing generates them and nothing is asked to guess them.

The cylindrical view is a real transform performed in your browser. Your artwork is resampled column by column onto the cylinder in orthographic projection, stepping uniformly in angle around the axis rather than uniformly across the page. Equal angular steps land at unequal screen positions, and that inequality is the distortion. It is not drawn on afterwards and it cannot be dialled down.

Your artwork is never composited onto a photograph of a product. There are no product photographs anywhere in this service.

The stroke measurement is also arithmetic: the raster is scanned for horizontal and vertical runs of ink, single-pixel runs are discarded as antialiasing, and the reported figure is the fifth percentile of what remains, converted to millimetres through the print-area scale.

A model is used for one thing: describing what it can see in a file you upload, so the reading can refer to parts of your artwork in words. It reports structure — orientation, where the weight sits, whether there is a transparent background.

No model performs any geometric transform, and no model produces any number you see. Model output is descriptive and can be wrong; the arithmetic is the part that has to be right, so the arithmetic is kept away from it.

Any text that has to be exactly correct — a dimension, a threshold, a label on a drawing — is drawn by the interface, not generated.

It has nothing to do with your design. It never evaluates the design, its subject or its style. It never creates artwork. It offers no aesthetic suggestion. When it proposes a change, the change is geometric.

It makes no copyright or trademark determination of any kind. Whether you have the right to print an image requires professional legal advice, which this service does not provide and does not imply. Nothing it returns is clearance. The acceptable use policy requires you to confirm you hold the necessary rights in what you upload.

It never uses your artwork to train a model, and never shows it as an example without your separate explicit consent for that specific file. Copyright in what you upload stays entirely with you and we claim no right in it.

It must not be relied on in high-risk contexts: medical, legal, financial, safety, employment, credit, housing or judicial. See the acceptable use policy.

Every reading carries this section and it is never empty. These are the variables that live with your printer rather than in your file:

• The press, printhead and ink set actually in use. Thresholds here are typical for the process; a well-maintained machine holds finer strokes than a tired one.
• Colour management end to end. What your colours become depends on the profile, the substrate and the curing.
• Size differences between brands of the same product. Two blanks both sold as an 11 oz mug can differ by several millimetres of print area, which moves every figure.
• Which side your supplier's handle is on, and exactly where their wrap starts.
• Whether the file you uploaded is the file that reaches the press. Rasterising, resizing and format conversion downstream all change the finest stroke that survives.

Readings are provided for information. They are as accurate as the geometry allows and no more accurate than the assumptions behind them, which are stated on every one. You remain responsible for your production decisions, and a test print remains the only way to know what a specific printer will do.