Ten of fourteen styles within 0.25 mm of the vendor die.
Packaging Dieline generates packaging dielines from geometry solved against 62 real vendor production dies, path by path. Every style carries its measured worst-case deviation, published below — including the four that are not good enough yet.
No account required to draw. No metered exports.
The studio
This is the whole instrument.
One canvas, one panel of dimensions, one Download button. No 3D tab, no artwork editor, no scene generator — because none of those tell you whether the flat will cut.
Units
Dimension types
Die-cut geometry — exactly what the die is cut to. No caliper compensation applied.
Length177.8–381
381
Width76.2–254
127
Height254–254
254
Thickness0.26–0.26
0.26
internal −0.30 −0.30 −0.45 external
+0.22 +0.22 +0.22
What Packaging Dieline is
Three things, each of them measured.
Every claim on this page is a figure you can check — in the table below, or in the file you export.
Published tolerances
Fourteen structures, each stating its worst-case deviation from the reference die in millimetres — the largest distance we measured, not an average. 0.017 mm at best, 3.71 mm at worst, solved against 62 vendor production dies.
An envelope that speaks up
The dies sampled a specific range of length, width, height and caliper. Type a size outside it and the studio says Extrapolating, names the dimension and the range, and stops claiming. Internal, external and die-cut modes compensate for board thickness live.
A file your printer accepts
DXF AC1024 in millimetres with true bulge arcs and vendor layer names, plus AI,
PDF, SVG and JSON. Round-trip verified to 0.00804 mm. Nothing is rasterised, and
exports are never counted, capped or watermarked on any tier.
Board and caliper
Three stocks the dies were actually cut from.
Caliper is not a cosmetic setting here — it moves the geometry. Every allowance, tuck depth and glue-flap girth in these engines is a function of board thickness, so the range each engine was solved over is the range it can speak for.
Kraft paperboard · 0.26 mm
190 g kraft, the one stock behind the grocery paper bag. All four of its reference dies are this caliper and no other, so the bag's caliper dependence is unverified — the engine says so rather than interpolating a curve it never saw.
pbg · 4 dies · worst 0.017 mm
Folding boxboard · 0.27–0.55 mm
Cartonboard, sampled at 0.27, 0.35, 0.42, 0.50 and 0.55 mm across the tuck-end, tray, flip-top, mailer, pillow and POS engines. Between those anchors the board tables interpolate; past the ends they clamp and the envelope turns amber.
rte · t26 · slf · mlr · plw · ps1 · ps2
E-flute corrugated · 1.50 mm
0.0591 in, printed in the vendor PDFs themselves. It is the only corrugated caliper on record, which is why a corrugated job outside 1.5 mm reports as extrapolating even on styles whose card figures are excellent.
cr6 · cr4 · ps1 · ps2 · t26 · mlr
The widest caliper spread in the set belongs to the gable box: five distinct values from 0.27 to 1.50 mm across its 8 dies. Only two of those dies carry a vendor PDF stating the caliper; the other six were read out of the geometry. That is written down in the engine, and it is part of why the gable box sits at 1.16 mm rather than with the verified group.
Inside the studio
Draw the flat. Read the number. Export the file.
Verified defaults
Pick a structure and its deviation and die count are on the picker before you choose. The weak ones are labelled there, not buried in a changelog.
Internal · external · die-cut
A three-way switch with live caliper compensation, so the number you type is the number you meant. Impossible geometry is flagged before anything is generated.
Production export
DXF, AI, PDF, SVG or JSON. Vector out, layers named the way your die maker expects. No count, no watermark, no downsample.
01
Pick a style
Fourteen structures, listed with their deviation and die count before you choose.
02
Type the dimensions
Internal, external or die-cut, with live caliper compensation and geometric checks.
03
Read the envelope
Verified, Extrapolating or Unverified — with the reason, in millimetres.
04
Export the file
DXF, AI, PDF, SVG or JSON. No count, no watermark, no downsample.
There is no 3D preview, and there is not going to be one. A folded render tells you what a box looks like. It does not tell you whether the flat will cut, whether the tuck will hold, or whether the file will open in your die maker's software. Packaging Dieline draws the flat and measures it. That is the whole product.
Export formats
Your printer will accept the file.
The loudest complaint in this category is not a missing feature. It is a download that arrives unusable. Five formats, each with its specification stated rather than described.
“The moment I want to download the dielines for print… the quality becomes AWFUL.” Their print company rejected the files as “too blurry.”
A published review of another dieline tool. This is the most common complaint in the category, and it is a file-format problem, not a taste problem.
DXF — AutoCAD interchange — what a die maker asks for
AC1024 · $INSUNITS = 4 (millimetres) ·
$MEASUREMENT = 1. Geometry is LWPOLYLINE with true bulge arcs — curves
stay curves and are never faceted into chords — plus real CIRCLE entities.
Vendor layer names: cuts, folds, bleeds.
Round-trip verified to 0.00804 mm — write the file, read it back, compare the geometry to what was generated.
0
SECTION
2
HEADER
9
$INSUNITS
70
4
9
$MEASUREMENT
70
1
0
ENDSEC
AI — Illustrator, with the layers already named
Opens in Illustrator directly. Named layers per line type and spot-style stroke colours, so the cut, fold and bleed separations arrive the way prepress expects them rather than as one flattened path.
Vector throughout. There is no raster stage anywhere in the pipeline.
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 %%Creator: Packaging Dieline %%LayerName: cuts %%LayerName: folds %%LayerName: bleeds
PDF — Vector, with toggleable layer groups
Vector throughout, with one optional-content layer group per line type. Cut, fold and bleed can be switched independently in Acrobat or in a prepress RIP without editing the artwork.
Page geometry is in millimetres and matches the DXF coordinate for coordinate.
/OCProperties << /OCGs [ 4 0 R 5 0 R 6 0 R ] >> /Name (cuts) /Name (folds) /Name (bleeds)
SVG — Layered, for the web and for review markup
One group per line type, at production stroke colours. This is the same output that draws the canvas in the studio and the same output that drew every thumbnail on this page.
Cut #FF0000, crease #0000FF, bleed #00FF00 — unchanged from the engine.
<g id="layer-cut" stroke="#FF0000"> <g id="layer-crease" stroke="#0000FF"> <g id="layer-bleed" stroke="#00FF00">
JSON — The panel ladder and every derived dimension
The panel ladder, the fold tree and every derived dimension the engine computed on the way to the flat. For anyone driving Packaging Dieline from their own MIS or web-to-print front end, and for checking our arithmetic against your own CAD measurement.
Nothing is rounded for display; the figures are the ones the geometry was built from.
{ "sheet": { "w": 1040.74, "h": 383 },
"ladder": [63.37, 63.37, 381, 63.5, 63.5, 381, 25],
"caliper": 0.26 }
Verify the claim yourself
You should not take an accuracy claim on trust — that is the whole point of this page. Five minutes, no account:
- Export any style as DXF and open it in a text editor.
- Find
$INSUNITSin the header. It reads4. Your file is in millimetres, not unitless drawing units. - Search for
LWPOLYLINE. Look at group code42— that is the bulge value on an arc segment. A rasterised or faceted file has none. - Check the
LAYERtable forcuts,foldsandbleeds. - Measure a panel in your own CAD. Compare it to the JSON export, which lists every derived dimension.
The three colours never move
Cut is #FF0000, crease is #0000FF, bleed is #00FF00 — the production values, not softened for the screen. On the canvas, in the thumbnails on this page, and in every one of the five files, they are the same colours.
And they are never metered
Not counted, not queued, not capped, not watermarked, not downsampled — on any tier. The free DXF is the same DXF. Fidelity is not a pricing lever.
The measurement
Every style, every tolerance, worst first.
Deviation is the largest distance we measured between Packaging Dieline's generated geometry and the reference die — across every sampled size, on every path. Not an average. The worst point we found.
Ten of the fourteen land at 0.25 mm or better. Three sit wider and say so. One has never been derived from a die at all, and is labelled draft everywhere it appears, including in the studio's own style picker.
What this category claims
- professional
- industry-standard
- production-ready
- precision engineered
We checked. As of August 2026, not one dieline tool publishes a measurable accuracy figure, and none claims verification against real vendor production dies. Those are adjectives. Adjectives are not a tolerance.
What Packaging Dieline publishes
- 0.017 mm best style, worst-case deviation
- 0.25 mm bound covering 10 of 14 styles
- 3.71 mm our worst published figure — auto-lock, no runnable verifier
- 2 styles we do not consider production ready
We publish the millimetre — the good one and the bad one, on the same page, in the same table. The worst figure we can still re-measure today is the gable box at 1.16 mm; auto-lock's 3.71 mm is larger, but its dies are not on hand to re-run.
| Style | Worst deviation | Scale (log, 0.01–10 mm) | Dies | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verified — 0.25 mm or better 10 styles | ||||
| Grocery Paper Bag (SOS)pbg · paperbag | 0.017mm | 4 | Best in the set. Sheet-width law is exact on all four. Model 220013. | |
| Hinged Lid Tray (FEFCO 0426)t26 · tray0426 | 0.027mm | 6 | Cut paths land at 0.0009 mm. Board and corrugated both sampled. | |
| Popcorn Boxpcn · popcorn | 0.10mm | 4 | Cut paths at or below 0.007 mm. Tapered tub, so the side panels are trapezoids. | |
| 6-Pack Bottle Carriercr6 · carrier6 | 0.12mm | 3 | Cut paths at or below 0.0022 mm. All three dies share W = 2L/3, so that ratio is the sampled one. | |
| 4-Pack Bottle Carriercr4 · carrier4 | 0.14mm | 4 | FEFCO 0723, model 183080. Every reference die has L = W. | |
| Self-Locking Flip Topslf · fliptop | 0.17mm | 4 | Cut paths at 0.004 mm. Requires W > H — the tray must be deeper than its wall. | |
| Roll-End Tuck-Top Mailermlr · mailer | 0.22mm | 6 | Three sizes at two calipers each, so the caliper compensation itself is verified. | |
| POS Display Boxps1 · pos1 | 0.24mm | 6 | Cut paths at or below 0.0013 mm. | |
| POS Display Box (Type 2)ps2 · pos2 | 0.24mm | 7 | A different structure from Type 1, not a variant. Three calipers sampled. | |
| Pillow Boxplw · pillow | 0.0032mm cut | 2 | The published figure is the cut-path deviation. Only 2 dies were solved against — the thinnest evidence in the verified group. Model 187000. | |
| Verified, wider tolerance 3 styles — usable with a proof, not without one | ||||
| Reverse Tuck Endrte · tuckend | 1.11mm | 3 | Model 100010. Was 10.87 mm before the August 2026 patch. Squat boxes (H ≤ W) change the lip and radius. | |
| Gable Box with Handlegbh · gable | 1.16mm | 8 | Our worst runnable style. Re-derived August 2026 on 8 dies, model 112310, across 5 calipers — the widest caliper spread in the set. On these 8 the baseline was 15.07 mm; the 4.94 mm published before it was a six-die figure, taken before the die set ever reached the width that broke the engine. The depth law is a clamp, so the knee sits at W = 160/161. | |
| Auto-Lock Bottomalb · tuckend | 3.71mm | 5 | No runnable verifier — and the largest figure on this page. The dies are not on hand, so this figure cannot currently be re-measured. Treated as unverified in the app. | |
| Draft — not production ready 1 style | ||||
| 123-Bottom Tuck Toptcb · tuckend | — | 0 | Never derived from a die. It follows the tuckend tube rules and nothing more. There is no measured deviation because there is nothing to measure it against. Do not send it to plate. | |
What a die count is
Each one is a real vendor production DXF — a file a converter actually ran. We solve the style's geometry against it path by path until the generated flat lands on the reference. Six dies means six independent chances for the model to be wrong — and, as the gable box found out, six is only as good as the widest die among them.
Why the bottom of this table is here
A tolerance you only publish when it flatters you is marketing. Auto-lock at 3.71 mm with no runnable verifier, gable at 1.16 mm on a die set that first had to embarrass us at 15.07 mm, and a draft style with no die behind it are the three worst facts about this product. They are on the front page.
Two of these numbers moved recently
The August 2026 patch took reverse tuck end from 10.87 mm to 1.11 mm. Gable went from a published 4.94 mm to 1.16 mm — but the honest step is larger than that. The 4.94 was a six-die figure; adding a W = 190 pair put the real 8-die baseline at 15.07 mm, and the re-derivation took it to 1.16 mm. When a figure changes, the table changes with it and says what it was.
The validity envelope
We tell you when we are guessing.
Every engine was solved from dies that covered a specific range of length, width, height and board caliper. Inside that range, the numbers in the table above apply. Outside it, the engine is extrapolating — and no amount of confident-looking output changes that. So Packaging Dieline says which one you are in, live, as you type. It is a panel, not a tooltip.
Length
120.00
dies: 120–200
Width
45.00
dies: 30–60
Height
160.00
dies: 100–550
W = 45.00 mm is inside the range these 3 dies sampled (30–60 mm). The published deviation of 1.11 mm applies.
- Verified Inside the sampled range The published deviation for that style applies to the flat you are looking at.
- Extrapolating Outside the sampled range Packaging Dieline names the dimension, your value, and the range the dies covered. The geometry still exports — it is just no longer covered by a measurement.
- Unverified No runnable verifier, or no die at all Auto-lock bottom and the 123-bottom draft. Stated plainly, every time, at every size.
Gallery
Sixteen flats, drawn by the shipping engines.
Not illustrations. Each thumbnail is the actual generator output at a size taken from a reference die — all fourteen structures, plus a second reference size for the reverse tuck end and the hinged lid tray. Cut in red, crease in blue, at production values.
View all fourteen in the catalogue
Bleed layer omitted at thumbnail scale; cut and crease are the engine's own geometry, rescaled, with collinear vertices below 0.3 units dropped so the file stays small.
Measured, not claimed
Three numbers this page is built on.
Pricing
Nothing about the file is for sale.
The two things that generate the angriest reviews in this category are metered dieline exports and a paywall that only shows itself after you have logged in. Neither exists here. What you pay for is breadth of structures and the workflow around them — never the fidelity of the file, and never the number of files.
Free
A real tool, not a trial. No card, no expiry.
- 4 of the 14 styles, including two verified at 0.10 mm or better
- Unlimited exports. Not counted, not queued, not capped
- All five formats at full fidelity — DXF, AI, PDF, SVG, JSON
- No watermark and no marker layer in the geometry
- Full validity envelope and dimension modes
- Commercial use permitted
Studio
Every structure we have, for one person who makes dielines all day.
- Everything in Free, plus:
- All 14 styles, including every new structure as it is verified
- Batch a size run — one structure across a list of dimensions, exported in one pass
- Saved presets and a board caliper library for your usual stocks
- Verification sheet — a one-page PDF per export stating the style, size, envelope status and published deviation, to send with the artwork
Team
For a studio or a converter with several people and shared standards.
- Everything in Studio, plus:
- Shared preset and caliper libraries across the team
- SSO and centralised billing
- JSON API for driving Packaging Dieline from your MIS or web-to-print front end
- Send us a die: your own structure solved and verified, with a published deviation figure like every other style
Four things we will not do
- 01No metered exports. Not on Free, not on any tier. A dieline you have drawn is a dieline you can download, as many times, in as many formats, as you want.
- 02No paywall after login. Every tier's full style list is on this page, before you sign up. You will never meet a locked structure only after you have already put your dimensions in.
- 03No degraded free output. The free DXF is the same DXF. Same bulge arcs, same layer names, same units, same round-trip figure. Fidelity is not a pricing lever.
- 04No hostage files. Cancel and your existing exports stay yours, and the Free tier keeps working with the styles it has always had.
Placeholder — social proof
Customer names, quotes and logos belong here. There are none on this page because there are none to publish yet, and a page whose entire argument is measured honesty is the wrong place to start inventing them. Owner: replace this block when real references exist.
Style catalogue
Sorted by how well we know them.
Four cuts through the same fourteen structures. The order is the argument, and the weak ones keep their labels wherever they appear.
Verified — 0.25 mm or better10 styles
Explore all tenSolved against real vendor dies and re-measurable on demand. Use these with confidence inside their envelope. Four of the ten are shown here, best first.
Deepest die coverage6 dies or more
Explore the recordA tolerance is only as good as the evidence under it. These four were solved against the largest die sets in the product — which is also how the gable box came to be re-derived.
Verified, wider tolerance3 styles
Read the caveatsUsable with a proof, not without one. Each of these three has a specific reason it sits here, and the reason is printed on the card rather than in a changelog.
Draft — not production ready1 style
See what draft meansOne structure has no die behind it at all. It is composed from two verified modules and has never been checked as a whole. It is in the product, and it is labelled, and it should not go to plate.
Questions
The objections, answered.
Why is there no 3D preview?
Because it would not have told you anything you need. A folded render answers “what does this box look like”. The questions that cost money are “will this flat cut”, “is the tuck the right depth for this caliper”, and “will my die maker’s software open the file”. None of those are answered by a render.
Building one properly would have taken the time that went into solving 62 vendor dies. We made that trade deliberately. If a 3D view is what you need, Packaging Dieline is not the right tool and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.
What happens if I work outside the verified range?
You get told, and you still get your file. The validity envelope switches from Verified to Extrapolating and names the exact problem — which dimension, your value, and the range the reference dies actually covered. For example: W = 200 mm is outside the range these 3 dies sampled (30–60 mm). Geometry is extrapolated.
The engine does not refuse. It stops claiming. The published deviation for that style simply does not apply to your flat any more, and Packaging Dieline will not pretend otherwise. In that state, cut a proof.
Is the DXF really production-ready, or just called that?
It is AC1024, with $INSUNITS = 4 and $MEASUREMENT = 1,
so it lands in millimetres rather than unitless drawing units. Curves are
LWPOLYLINE segments carrying true bulge values, not polygons pretending to
be arcs, and circles are real CIRCLE entities. Layers are named
cuts, folds and bleeds, which is what die makers expect
to receive.
We write the file, read it back, and compare the geometry to what we generated. The worst disagreement in that round trip is 0.00804 mm. Nothing is rasterised at any point in the pipeline, so there is no resolution to be too low.
You do not have to believe any of that. Open the file in a text editor and look — the steps are listed in the exports section above.
What does “verified against vendor dies” actually mean?
It means we obtained real production DXFs — files that converters actually ran — and solved each style's geometry against them path by path, until the generated flat landed on the reference. The deviation we publish is the largest distance between our geometry and the reference die, across every sampled size and every path. Not an average, not a typical case. The worst point we found.
The die count is how many independent dies a style was solved against. It matters as much as the deviation: 0.017 mm across 4 dies is a stronger claim than a tighter number across one. It is also why the pillow box, at 2 dies, is flagged even though its figure is small.
The weak styles — what do they mean for me in practice?
Gable box, 1.16 mm. Our worst style that still has a verifier we can run — and the most instructive number on this page. It was published at 4.94 mm, which was a six-die figure. Adding a pair of W = 190 dies showed the die set had never reached the width where the engine actually broke: on all eight dies the honest baseline was 15.07 mm. Re-derived against all eight, it is 1.16 mm worst case, with sheet identity passing 8 of 8 at a worst residual of 0.0592 mm.
The old explanation was wrong too. We described a width-dependent law breaking “at W ≥ 152 mm”. It is not a break, it is a clamp: the lock depth is sec + min(sec, 80), one constant, exact to 0.0592 mm on all eight dies. That puts the knee at W = 160/161, not 152, and the same saturation shows up independently in the lock cutout and the V-tab. So the engine is not degrading above 152 mm — it is following a law we had mislocated. Model 112310, 8 dies, 5 distinct calipers (0.27, 0.35, 0.50, 1.00, 1.50), the widest caliper spread of any family in the set. Usable, with care: still cut a proof before a run.
Two things are still open, and we would rather say so. The caliper step threshold is bracketed only to (0.5, 1.0] — a die at t = 0.7–0.9 would close it. And the V-tab knee is bracketed between W = 152 and W = 180; a die at W = 160–170 would pin it.
Reverse tuck end, 1.11 mm. Fine for layout and quoting. For plate, proof it, particularly on squat boxes where H ≤ W — that is where the lip and corner radius shift.
Auto-lock bottom, 3.71 mm, no runnable verifier. The largest figure we publish. It came from a solve we can no longer re-run, because those dies are not on hand. We treat it as unverified in the app and you should treat it as a starting geometry to correct, not a finished die.
123-bottom tuck top, no die at all. A draft. It follows the tuckend tube rules and nothing more. Use it to discuss a structure. Do not send it to plate.
Will I hit a paywall once I am logged in?
No. The free tier's style list is published on this page, before signup, and it does not shrink. Exports are never metered on any tier — not counted, not capped, not watermarked, not downsampled. If a structure is not included in your tier, you will see that in the style picker before you type a single dimension, not at the download button.
How often do these numbers change?
Whenever we solve more dies. Two figures moved in the August 2026 patch: reverse tuck end went from 10.87 mm to 1.11 mm, and gable from a published 4.94 mm to 1.16 mm. The gable one is worth reading twice: the 4.94 was measured on six dies, and adding two wider ones put the honest eight-die baseline at 15.07 mm before the re-derivation brought it to 1.16 mm. The number moved because the evidence grew, not because the engine got luckier. All the old values are still printed in the table, because a tolerance history you can read is worth more than a tolerance you have to trust.
If a number ever moves the wrong way, it will be published the same day, in the same table.
Dielines that show their work
Open it, draw a box, read the millimetre.
Nothing to install, no card, no metered export. If the number is not good enough for your job, the table above already told you.