What is a dieline?

A dieline is the flat plan of a box — every cut, every fold, drawn at full size before a single sheet is printed. Fold it up and you have the carton; hand it to a converter and you have described the tooling.

The two kinds of line

Almost everything on a dieline is one of two things.

• Cut — where the knife goes through the board. The outline of the blank, and any hole, slot or slit inside it.
• Crease (or fold, or score) — where the board is pressed rather than cut, so it bends cleanly instead of cracking.

The two standards mark them differently, which catches people out when comparing drawings. FEFCO prints creases in red against black cuts. ECMA prints almost everything in the same near-black ink and separates them by line style — solid is a cutting line, dashed is a fold line. Neither is more correct; they are simply different conventions.

What a dieline is not

It is not artwork, and it is not a proof. It carries no colour, no bleed and no printed content — it is the geometry the artwork is later laid onto. See putting artwork on a dieline for how the two fit together.

It is also not a 3D model. A dieline says where the board is cut and where it bends; how the box behaves when folded follows from that, but the file itself is flat.

Why they are drawn to a standard

Because a box style is a shared vocabulary. Rather than describing "a tray with the walls doubled back and locking corners" you say 0427, and any converter in the trade knows the construction. That is the whole purpose of FEFCO and ECMA codes.

Getting one

A dieline is geometry, so it can be generated from dimensions rather than drawn by hand. Set length, width and depth, pick a style, and the lines follow. That is what this site does — free, in the browser, in SVG, DXF or 1:1 PDF.

Whatever you generate, cut and fold a sample before committing to a die. Board has thickness and behaves in ways a drawing cannot show.