Fold Dieline Generator
Enter your flat size, pick a fold, and get the panel widths worked out to the commercial spec plus a downloadable SVG dieline at real physical size — trim, bleed, a safe area inside every panel, and fold lines, on four separate named layers, ready to open in Illustrator, Affinity, or Inkscape. It all runs in your browser; nothing uploads.
Enter the flat (unfolded) width and height to draw a dieline.
A planning aid, not a quote — exact specs come with your quote. Request a free quote →
Fold Dieline Generator FAQ
Built by SHIFT Design in Buffalo, MN — free to use, no sign-up. When you are ready to make it real, we design and print it.
Because there is no single tri-fold. The panel widths depend entirely on the flat size, and the flat size depends on the sheet it prints on, the rack it has to fit, and how much has to go on it. A fixed PDF would be right for exactly one dimension and wrong for every other one. The pieces that do have a fixed size, we have templated — eleven of them. This one gets generated to your numbers instead.
Because it folds inside the other two. Paper on the inside of a fold travels a shorter distance than paper on the outside, so a panel that has to hide between two others must be cut narrower or it runs into the crease and the piece will not close flat. On an 11" sheet the standard is 3.6875" / 3.6875" / 3.625" — a sixteenth of an inch off the tucked panel, and the three still add back to exactly 11". A Z-fold does not need it, because a Z-fold never puts one panel inside another.
It matters a great deal, and it is the single easiest thing to get backwards. The tool draws one face of the flat sheet with the tucked panel at the right-hand end. The other face is a mirror of that, so on the reverse the same physical panel appears at the left — if you lay both sides out with the narrow panel on the same side of the page, one of them is wrong and the piece folds inside out. Set the front and back from the same dieline, flipped, and check the fold direction on your proof before it runs.
It is built for vector apps. Inkscape and Affinity Designer read the four groups as named layers; Illustrator reads them as named groups, which you can still lock, hide, or delete. Photoshop will open the file, but it rasterizes the drawing and the structure goes with it, which defeats the point of a dieline. Canva does not really handle dielines at all — if Canva is your tool, set your document to the build size this tool reports and lay the fold positions in as guides. The Canva print guide walks through the rest.
This tool covers the four folds whose panel math is settled and standard: half, Z-fold, gate, and roll/tri-fold. Double parallel folds, french folds, and roll folds of more than three panels each carry their own geometry and their own bindery constraints, and we would rather build those by hand than publish a formula we cannot stand behind. Door hangers are a different case again — they are die-cut rather than folded, and the common 4.25" × 11" size is already a fixed template in the library. For anything else, ask us and we will send a dieline for the piece you actually have.
No, and no tool can tell you that. A dieline gets the geometry right, which is genuinely most of the trouble — but it says nothing about your image resolution, your color build, your fonts, or whether the fold direction matches the way the piece is meant to read. That is what a proof is for. Every job we run gets a human proof, and the fold setup gets confirmed against the folder that will actually run it before anything prints.
Behind the numbers
A dieline is the drawing underneath the artwork. It marks where the sheet gets cut, how far color has to run past that cut, how far in the type has to stay, and — on anything that folds — exactly where the paper creases. Every other template on this site ships as a finished PDF because the size never moves: a business card is 3.5" × 2" this year and next. A fold template cannot work that way. Move the flat width a quarter inch and every panel, every fold line, and the folded size all move with it, which is why our template library holds eleven fixed-size files and not one fold. This tool draws the template instead of storing it.
The number that catches people out is the panel width. Three panels on an 11" sheet look like they should be 3.667" each, and on a Z-fold they are — a Z-fold zigzags, so no panel ever ends up inside another one. A roll fold, which is what most people mean by tri-fold, is different: one panel folds in first and the other two close around it. Paper on the inside of a fold has a shorter distance to travel than paper on the outside, so if all three panels are cut equal, the tucked panel runs long, jams against the crease, and the piece will not close flat — you get a bulge down the folded edge and a stack that will not sit square in a rack. The fix is to take the difference out of the panel that hides: 3.6875" / 3.6875" / 3.625" on an 11" sheet, the tucked panel a sixteenth of an inch narrower than each of its neighbors. That is the standard commercial spec, it adds back to exactly 11", and it is what this tool draws.
Because those numbers are sixteenths, the tool reports them as sixteenths — 3.6875, not a tidied-up 3.688 that would leave you a thousandth over the sheet by the third panel. Set your guides from the fold positions the tool gives you, measured from the left trim edge, rather than by stacking rounded panel widths across the page: on a Z-fold the panels are exact thirds, which no decimal ever lands on, and the rounding error compounds every time you add one.
The allowance grows with the stock. A sixteenth is right for the text weights most brochures print on; the thicker the sheet, the further the outside of the fold has to travel and the more relief the tucked panel needs. There is no universal number for that — it depends on the caliper and on the folder that runs the job — so rather than publish a figure we would have to walk back, tell us the stock and we will set it. Heavier stock brings a second problem with it: coated and cover weights crack along a fold unless they are scored first, which crushes the fibers in a controlled line so the sheet bends instead of splitting. The paper weight guide explains why the lb number on the label tells you almost nothing about caliper until you know which stock family it belongs to.
One thing this dieline does that a flat template cannot: the safe area is drawn per panel, not once around the sheet. A safe margin is normally a trim-edge rule, but on a folded piece the fold is just as unforgiving — type that runs up to a crease gets bent through it, and fold registration drifts a little on every machine. So each panel gets its own blue box, inset on all four sides, and the readout tells you how much column that leaves inside the narrowest panel. If that number is under an inch and a half, the panel is tight for body copy no matter how good the layout is.
The download is an SVG rather than a PDF for a reason: SVG carries named groups, so TRIM, BLEED, SAFE and GUIDES arrive as four separate objects you can lock, hide, or delete instead of one flattened drawing you have to trace over. Inkscape and Affinity Designer read them as true layers; Illustrator reads them as named groups, which behave the same way for this purpose. The file states its size in inches with one user unit to the point, so it opens at true physical size in all three. Build your artwork on top, run backgrounds out to the red bleed line, keep text inside the blue safe boxes, and switch the guide layer off before you export. Then send it over: we check the panel order and the fold direction against the machine that will actually fold the job, and you see it on a proof before anything runs. If you only want the numbers, the brochure fold calculator gives you the same panel widths without the drawing, and the bleed & safe-area calculator covers flat pieces that do not fold.
Ready to start your project?
Tell us what you need and we'll put together a custom quote — no cost, no commitment.