What is plotter cutting?

The key control is blade depth, and it produces two quite different operations. Kiss cutting sets the blade to cut through the printed face and its adhesive but not the backing paper, which is what leaves a sticker sitting on a sheet ready to peel. Cutting through everything separates the pieces completely, for individual labels and shapes.

For printed work the plotter has to find the image before it can follow it. Registration marks are printed alongside the artwork, an optical sensor reads them, and the cut path is aligned to what was actually printed rather than to where the file said it would be. That is what keeps a contour cut accurate across a long roll where the material has stretched slightly.

The commercial advantage over die-cutting is that there is no tool to make. Any shape can be cut from a vector path with no set-up cost, which makes short runs and one-off shapes economic and lets a design change between orders at no penalty. The trade-off is speed: a blade tracing every outline individually is far slower than a die stamping a whole sheet at once, so at volume die-cutting wins decisively.

It is also how cut vinyl lettering is produced for windows and vehicles — cut from coloured vinyl with no printing involved at all, then weeded and applied with transfer tape.