Small text in print artwork: the height below which strokes close up
Type fails on fabric from the inside out. The stroke closes before the letter does, so a line of text stops being readable while it still looks like text — a customer sees a grey smear where a phone number was. The threshold is a physical height on the garment, which means it can be converted into pixels and checked against the file that arrived.
| Working floor for DTF lettering | roughly 4 mm cap height at print size |
|---|---|
| 4 mm rendered at 300 DPI | 47 pixels tall |
| 4 mm rendered at 200 DPI | 31 pixels tall |
| Where the failure starts | the counters — the enclosed gaps in a, e, o, g |
| What closes them | ink spread into the weave plus a stroke only a pixel or two wide |
Why font size in the design file tells you nothing
A point size is meaningful relative to a page that has a fixed physical size. Artwork has no fixed physical size until a print width is chosen, so the same 12 pt label is 6 mm tall on one order and 2 mm on the next. The only number that transfers is the height the letters will occupy on the garment.
The two ways small type is lost
They need different fixes, and only one of them is a resolution problem.
- Not enough pixels: the strokes are jagged or soft before printing begins
- Enough pixels, too small: the strokes are clean and still close on fabric
- The second cannot be fixed by supplying a larger file
What to do with a phone number that will not fit
Reflowing is usually cheaper than rescuing. Setting the same text at a larger height and a shorter width — dropping a line break, abbreviating, moving it to a second placement — keeps the information and stays above the floor. It is a design change, so it is a conversation with the customer rather than a repair.
FAQ
- Does a bolder weight help?
- Yes, up to a point, because the stroke gains width faster than the counters lose it. Very bold faces then fail differently, with the counters filling in.
- Is white text on a dark garment worse?
- It behaves differently rather than worse. White ink laid under colour tends to spread slightly more, so the practical floor sits a little higher.
- Can the text be redrawn as vector?
- If it is real text, yes, and that removes the resolution half of the problem entirely. It does not move the physical floor.