Reading the cut report: enlargement hint and detail retention

The example figures come from the tracer's test package (eight CC0 and public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons, traced on 18 October 2026 at a 0.5 mm minimum feature). The percentages are what the software measured on its own output; a test cut on your plotter is still the final word.

Every cut job on the image to SVG vectorizer ends with a result panel that says more than pass or fail. It tells you the three measurements the contract was judged on, how many clean-up rounds it took, how much of the original detail survived, and, when the file cannot be cut at the size you asked for, how much larger it would have to be. This guide reads that panel line by line.

The status badge

The first badge is the outcome of the whole job and has three values. Done means the file was written and passed the tracer's own comparison against the source. Cut contract not met means the file was written but the last clean-up round still left something below the limit; you can download it, but read the enlargement hint first. Quality check failed means the file was written but did not pass the final coverage comparison with the source image: the traced shapes and the original disagree about where the ink is by more than the tracer allows. Compare the preview with the original before using such a file, and open the warnings list under the panel to see what was off.

The cut contract and its three numbers

The second badge is the contract itself: passed or not met, against the limit you entered (0.5 mm by default). Three measurements sit under it, all taken on the final paths of the file you download, in millimetres:

• Smallest feature: the thinnest part of any shape. On a lettering stencil this is the thinnest stroke of a letter.
• Narrowest gap: the closest approach between two separate shapes. Below the limit, the knife leaves a bridge of vinyl.
• Narrowest neck: the thinnest connection inside one shape. Below the limit, the shape breaks during weeding.

A dash instead of a number means that measurement does not apply: a single silhouette has no gap, and a shape with no pinch points has no neck. The contour count and the cut length are informational, not part of the contract; the length is the total distance the knife travels and is a fair proxy for the time and the weeding the job will take.

When the contract is not met, the panel lists the checks that failed by name, for instance min_feature or hole_orientation, with a short detail. A failed orientation check means an inner contour was not wound opposite to its outer one, which some cutting programs read as a separate shape instead of a hole; it is rare after the clean-up but worth knowing when you see it.

Clean-up rounds

The tracer does not stop at the first failing check. It runs the blade-width clean-up at three levels, each with a radius 30% larger than the last (×1, ×1.3 and ×1.69 of the base radius), and within each level it stamps small patch discs, one blade diameter wide, on the exact spots the check reported as too narrow. The Clean-up rounds list in the panel shows every round with its result, its tightening factor, the number of patches and the narrowest measurement it reached. Two things stop the loop early: a round that destroys content (less than 70% of the cut path survives) is not taken further, and a smallest feature that sits below 35% of the limit is judged too fine to fix by cleaning, because thickening would merge the shape into its neighbours.

The enlargement hint

When the last round still fails, the tracer keeps the round whose narrowest spot was widest and computes how much larger the design would have to be for that spot to clear the limit. The panel shows it as a percentage: enlarge the design by at least that much and it becomes cuttable at this blade width. The number is a scale, not a guess: it is the limit divided by the narrowest measured spot, so a 0.25 mm neck against a 0.5 mm limit asks for the design to be twice as large. Because the three measurements are in millimetres, the hint is only as good as the width you entered; with no width the tracer assumed 300 dpi, and the honest first step is to enter the real size and run again.

If enlarging is not an option (the sticker has to be 40 mm wide), the alternatives are a lower minimum feature on a machine that can cut it (a laser on paper or card), or a simpler design: the logo guide discusses cutting a mark without its tagline.

Detail retention and the detail warning

Passing the contract can cost detail, and the panel says how much. Detail retention is the boundary length of the cleaned mask divided by the boundary length of the source mask, where the source mask was first denoised with a small 3×3 opening so that JPEG grain does not count as detail. 100% means the clean-up changed nothing that mattered; 53%, as in the sticker above, means almost half the edge length is gone, which is what it takes to turn a photo of brush strokes into shapes a knife can follow. Thickening can briefly make the boundary longer, so the ratio is capped at 100%.

The detail warning appears on a passing file when any of four things happened: retention fell under 80%, patch discs were used, a tightening round beyond the first was needed, or less than 95% of the cut path content survived. In layered mode a fifth trigger is the blade being wider than 1% of the design's short side, which is a size, not a design, problem. The warning does not mean the file is bad; it means the cut will be coarser than the source, and the only way to get the fine detail back is a larger design or a higher-resolution source.

In the test package every passing photo-born file carried the warning (retention 53% to 86%), the vector-born coat of arms in single-colour mode did not (94%), and the sign with large lettering reported 99% with a warning only because one patch disc was used. Those numbers are a useful calibration: under 70% expect visibly simplified shapes, over 90% expect the source as it was.

Layers, warnings and the download

Layered files list their groups under the panel with a colour swatch each, named katman-N-rrggbb; the layered vinyl guide explains how to cut them. The warnings list collects everything the tracer gave up on or changed, including colours dropped for being thinner than the blade and the quality-check message when the status is not Done. The preview and the whole report are free to look at; the SVG and the report file are what the download hands over, under the same daily free use and credits as the other metered tools, as the pricing page describes.