Cap height, line breaks and reading distance for printed garments
You designed it at thirty centimetres. It gets read at three metres. Drag the slider and watch the difference happen — no account, nothing to install.
Magnified — what your eye resolves here
0 samples per character
Nothing you type here is stored, and nothing you type here is read. The engine counts characters and measures widths.
Three steps
The words that are going on the garment, exactly as they will be printed. The engine counts characters and measures widths. It does not read the sentence.
Chest, back or sleeve, each of which has a different usable print width, and the distance the person reading it will actually be standing at.
Cap height in millimetres and in points, the line breaks and the reason for each, the three distance views, and the full list of things that will move the answer and that nobody can know in advance.
One metre, three metres, five metres
Reads as you walk past
At 1 m the whole line reads: "EAST SIDE ROWING CLUB 1998".
At this distance the letters are above the sign industry's best-impact height. A person walking past reads the line without deciding to.
99.3′ at the eye · floor is 11.5′
Reads as you walk past
At 3 m the whole line reads: "EAST SIDE ROWING CLUB 1998".
At this distance the letters are above the sign industry's best-impact height. A person walking past reads the line without deciding to.
33.1′ at the eye · floor is 11.5′
Readable if you stop
At 5 m a passer-by gets "EAST SIDE ROWING CLUB". "1998" is still legible to somebody who stops, but a glance does not reach it.
At this distance the letters sit between the best-impact height and the legibility index. Somebody who stops and looks will read it. Somebody walking past catches the first few words and nothing else.
19.9′ at the eye · floor is 11.5′
The cap height is the same in all three panels. Nothing has been made smaller and nothing has been blurred. What changes between them is how many independent samples an eye takes across the print, and that falls off with distance whether or not anybody likes it.
Where to break it
same words · same print width · 280 mm
15.2 mm / 15.2 mm cap height
At 3 m a passer-by gets "THE LONG WAY ROUND TO". "THE HARBOUR GATE" is still legible to somebody who stops, but a glance does not reach it.
The first line ends on "to", so the reader is holding the sentence open across the turn. The two lines are also badly matched in length, which forces the cap height down to 15.2 mm to make the longer one fit.
16.7 mm / 16.7 mm cap height
At 3 m a passer-by gets "THE LONG WAY ROUND TO". "THE HARBOUR GATE" is still legible to somebody who stops, but a glance does not reach it.
Break after "ROUND". It is not an article, a conjunction or a preposition, so the line does not end on a word the reader has to hold open. The two lines also come out within a few characters of each other, which keeps the cap height as large as the print area allows.
What survives
What most tools give you
24.5 mm
A cap height. Correct, and almost useless on its own, because it does not tell you what happens to the words you already have.
What the answer has to include
At three metres a passer-by gets “SUMMER FIELD DAY”. “VOLUNTEER CREW 2026” is still legible to somebody who stops, but a glance does not reach it.
That is the actual output for a thirty-six character line across a chest, and it is something anybody can act on before the screens are made. It also separates the two ways a word is lost: below the legibility floor a word is gone however long you look, and past the glance it is perfectly readable to anybody who stops. Those call for different fixes.
Words are not lost evenly. A subordinate line set at sixty per cent of the main size crosses the legibility floor at roughly sixty per cent of the distance, so a trailing year disappears while the name above it is still perfectly readable. Everything else is lost in order, because a glance starts at the top and runs out.
A longer line has to be set smaller to fit the same print width, so every extra word costs height for all of the other words as well. Twenty-six characters on a single row across a chest is about twelve millimetres of cap height, which is a one-metre line and nothing more. Breaking the same words over three rows buys nearly three times that.
Conditions
From the bank, roughly eighteen metres
Nothing printed on a garment is legible here. The distance a client pictures is almost never the distance the reader is standing at.
280 mm of usable width
The chest of an adult medium. Every extra character in the line takes height away from all of the others.
Ink spread on jersey
The stroke finishes wider than it left the screen. Below about fifteen millimetres this costs you more than the height does.
Down a corridor, about twenty-five metres
The range at which a back print becomes a colour and a rough shape. Nothing about the words is available any more, and no cap height that fits a shirt would change that.
Heights, in order
The sign trade has been sizing letters against distance for decades. This tool does nothing more clever than apply it to cloth.
Thirty metres, in flat light
Two variables move at once out here: the distance grows and the light drops. Only one of them is in the arithmetic.
Indoors, and darker than you think
Every figure on this site assumes open daylight. A room like this moves the threshold, and it moves it the wrong way.
340 mm across the back
The only placement with room for a long line, and the only one read while the wearer is walking away rather than past.
90 mm down the sleeve
Conversational distance or nothing. Past two short words, a sleeve print falls below the legibility floor at two metres.
Stroke, measured
Weight and width are quantities, so this tool treats them as quantities. It never describes a typeface as having an attitude.
The same layout, every name
A run has to hold for the longest name in the set. Sizing to the shortest is how a batch ends up with one shirt that does not match.
Before the screen is made
This is the moment the tool is for. Once the screen exists, a cap height has stopped being a decision.
Across a pitch
A back print at this range is a shape with a colour. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what the shape was meant to do, and that part is not ours to say.
Every garment shown here is blank. Type has to be correct to the character, so anything on this site that shows words on cloth is drawn in your browser from the words you typed, over a photograph rather than inside one.
This list appears in full on every result, including on the free plan, and no watermark is ever placed over it.
The line this service does not cross
We only measure how far your words can be read. What they say is entirely yours.
No part of this service evaluates content, stance or subject matter. The engine counts characters, measures widths and computes angles. Two sentences of the same length get the same specification.
There is no wording suggestion, no rephrasing, no shortening for effect and no advice about what would land better. If a line is too long for the distance, the answer is the arithmetic, and what you do about it is yours.
Stroke weight and width are measurable and they change the answer, so they are treated as measurements. A typeface is never described as having an attitude, and none is ever recommended on the basis of what the line says.
The acceptable use policy prohibits unlawful material, hate and harassment, and use of somebody else's trademark or copyrighted text. That is a platform floor rather than a judgement about lawful opinions, and the two are not in tension.
Plans
$0
No card, no expiry
One distance, one number, and every caveat that comes with it. Enough to find out whether the answer changes what you were going to print.
$9 / month
or $86 a year · plus sales tax
All three distances side by side, which is the only arrangement that shows you what you are about to lose.
$27 / month
or $259 a year · plus sales tax
For a run of names, a squad list or a season of event shirts, where the same layout has to hold for the longest name in the set.
Free gives you three metres. One distance, one cap height, and the whole list of what the engine cannot know, unabridged. What it cannot give you is the comparison, because the comparison is the product: a single number is easy to nod at, and three of them next to each other is what shows you that at five metres only two words are left. Paid plans add the one-metre and five-metre bands, the line-break plan, and the specification sheet you send to the printer.
A service allowance and nothing else. It is not money, it has no cash value, it cannot be transferred and it does not carry over to the next period. Nothing on this site sells extra allowance on its own: if you run out, wait for the reset or move up a plan. Prices exclude tax, and sales tax is calculated at checkout from where you are.
Everything on the pricing pageQuestions
No, and it is worth being exact about why. This service measures how far type can be read. It does not read what the type says, it does not assess or comment on it, it does not rewrite or shorten it, and it does not pick a typeface on the basis of the message. If a line is too long to be read at five metres, what you get back is the arithmetic that shows it and the print width it has to live in. What you do about that — cut a word, split it over two lines, move it to the back, or print it exactly as it is — is entirely yours.
It is a geometric simulation, not a measurement. The cap height and the distance thresholds come from the sign industry's long-settled rules — one inch of cap height per ten feet for glance legibility, and the legibility index for the point where letters stop being letters — and the decay views are produced by resampling the print to the number of samples a 20/20 eye takes across it at that distance, not by blurring an image. What no simulation can include is the light it will actually be read in, the angle it will be read from, how far the ink wicks along the yarn on your particular cloth, or the typeface you finally print in. Every one of those is listed on every result, and every generated image carries a mark saying it was simulated at typical daylight.
No. Lines you type are not used to train any model, are not sold, and are not shared for anybody else's advertising. On the free plan a line is processed and discarded and never reaches storage. If you save a project on a paid plan it is stored against your account until you delete it, and deleting it removes it from live systems immediately and from backups within thirty days.
In your account, in two clicks: Billing, then Cancel subscription. There is no phone call, no email, no support ticket, no offer to keep you and no series of screens asking why. Cancelling stops the next renewal. Your plan then keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and we do not refund part of a period. We will always tell you the exact date it ends before you confirm.
One question about a line costs one credit, sizing a line and planning its breaks costs two, and a full distance set with the specification card costs five. An allowance is a service allowance: it is not money, it has no cash value, it cannot be transferred, and it does not carry over to the next month. There are no credit packs and no top-ups, so the only way past an allowance is a larger plan or the next reset.
No. The free plan is a free plan, not a trial: it takes no card, it does not expire, and it never becomes a paid subscription on its own. If you do subscribe, the amount, the date of the first charge and the renewal are all set out on one screen before you authorise anything, and you tick a separate box to confirm you have read them.
Anybody aged thirteen or over. This service is not offered to children under thirteen and we do not knowingly collect their personal information; if you believe a child under thirteen has given us information, write to support and we will delete it. If you are between thirteen and eighteen, use it with a parent or guardian's involvement.
Prices on this site are shown in US dollars and exclude tax. Sales tax, where it applies to your location, is calculated at checkout and shown before you authorise the payment, so the total you confirm is the total you are charged.
Anything else: the support page.
No account for the slider at the top of this page. An account, and no card, for the free plan. The arithmetic is the same either way.
Prices in US dollars, tax added at checkout. Cancel in two clicks.
