Intro - Building a gang sheet builder

2024-12-02

What am I guilding, and why? 😊

I’ve seen a few ads from DTF suppliers for different gangsheet builders.

Most of them are web-based, and from my viewpoint with rather limited functionality.

For me, the main issue is that they view the world as ‘square’: the logos are laid out as squares/rectangles.

But with very few exceptions (flags being the main one), most logos are NOT square.

This will lead to a lot of wasted space when printing the logos. I’ve a suspicion that some companies show a square based gang sheet builder to the end user, but internally use a system with a more advanced layout engine.

This led me, once again, to the thought: How hard can it be?

On a high level, all you need is:

• A way to detect the transparent part of a logo (segmentation)
• An algorithm/system for squeezing as many logos as possible onto a sheet. This can be done by shuffling the positions of the logos and rotating them (the last part being the most important)
• Export the optimally positioned logos to a file that can be printed on a DTP printer

My first thought was that the first part - segmenting - the logos would be the hardest, so that was where I began.

Written by: Jesper Halvorsen