Rasterizing Text issue

[Infinity]

Hi,

First off, I'm a huge fan of Affinity Photo and Designer. The one issue I have been having is rasterizing text with a transparent background in Affinity Designer. Everything looks great when I'm designing my images, but since I'm printing on T-shirts, there has to be a transparent background. Basically what happens is the text becomes pixelated and I'm looking to smooth it out when I export it. Does anyone have any tips on how to do that? Thanks in advance!

[Gear maker]

To smooth out the pixelation you would have to increase the DPI of your drawing.

[toltec]

8 hours ago, Infinity said:

Hi,

First off, I'm a huge fan of Affinity Photo and Designer. The one issue I have been having is rasterizing text with a transparent background in Affinity Designer. Everything looks great when I'm designing my images, but since I'm printing on T-shirts, there has to be a transparent background. Basically what happens is the text becomes pixelated and I'm looking to smooth it out when I export it. Does anyone have any tips on how to do that? Thanks in advance!

Why are you rasterising the text?

Text automatically has a transparent background, as long as your document is set to be transparent.

It will then remain at much better quality. 

[Fixx]

6 minutes ago, toltec said:

Why are you rasterising the text?

Maybe because: "printing on T-shirts"?

Question is if printer can handle PDF, or if it needs bitmap format, and if this bitmap format have to be 1-bit...?

[toltec]

1 hour ago, Fixx said:

Maybe because: "printing on T-shirts"?

Question is if printer can handle PDF, or if it needs bitmap format, and if this bitmap format have to be 1-bit...?

Well, I produced thousands of films for tee-shirt printers using an imagesetter, not once was the text rasterised first. Hence my surprise 

At most it might be converted to curves if the font was a bit odd, but never rasterised. That was the job of the RIP (the R as in Rasterise).

 

[Fixx]

2 hours ago, toltec said:

Well, I produced thousands of films for tee-shirt printers using an imagesetter, not once was the text rasterised first. Hence my surprise 

At most it might be converted to curves if the font was a bit odd, but never rasterised. That was the job of the RIP (the R as in Rasterise).

Basically yes. But halftoning (% colours, if used) will need special treatment as needed lpi is so low.

[toltec]

1 hour ago, Fixx said:

Basically yes. But halftoning (% colours, if used) will need special treatment as needed lpi is so low.

So how does that relate to printing text ? 

[Fixx]

it does not if you print solid colour.

[Infinity]

Thank you all for getting back to me! I thought I was supposed to do that because of a tutorial I watched. I'll definitely try not doing that and seeing if it makes a difference. I saved the image at 400dpi And toltec, I'll definitely reprint with bigger text. I tried to cram 16 cursive letters in one row...

Also Fixx, I apologize if this is a dumb question, but when you say halftoning colors, what do you mean?

[Fixx]

Halftoning is a process to present shades of colour using dots. All normal printers and imagesetters use halftoning.

If your fabric printer "just prints" all colours like you have at computer screen you do not have to worry about it. But if you use serigraphic process to print t-shirts you basically have just one print colour (unless you print several layers of colour). If you want to have percentages ("fades") of colour or mix two colour you need halftoning. As halftone lpi needed for seri is low it is not very easy to produce such low lpi. Some printers do, most do not.