DTF Gang Sheets Explained: Sizes, 300 DPI and How to Fill a Sheet Without Wasting Film

What a DTF gang sheet is, which width and resolution printers expect, why a clear background matters, and how to lay out prints for several shirt sizes on one sheet.

DTF (direct to film) has become the easiest way to get full colour prints on shirts in small runs. You send a file, the shop prints it onto film with a white layer behind it, and the transfer gets heat pressed onto the garment.

Most shops charge by the length of film used. That's where the gang sheet comes in, and where most people lose money without noticing.

What a gang sheet is

A gang sheet is one long image with lots of prints packed onto it. Instead of sending ten separate files, you send one sheet with ten prints arranged side by side and top to bottom. The shop prints the sheet, cuts the transfers apart and presses them.

Because you pay by length, how tightly you pack the sheet directly changes your bill.

Sheet width

DTF printers use rolls of a fixed width. Common sizes are around 30 cm and around 56 to 60 cm, and many Indian and international shops use a sheet close to 58 cm (about 22 to 23 inches). The length is up to you, often capped somewhere around 100 cm per sheet, with longer orders split across sheets.

Always ask your shop for their exact printable width before you build a sheet.

Resolution and size

Two rules matter more than anything else:

300 DPI at real size. If your print should be 25 cm wide on the shirt, it needs to be 25 cm wide in the file at 300 DPI. A small image stretched up will print soft.
Don't make the shop scale it. Scaling at the shop is how a chest print ends up the wrong size. Build it at the size you want and say "print as is".

Background: clear, not white

DTF prints a white layer behind your colours so they show up on dark fabric. Anything that's white in your file will print as white. Anything transparent won't print at all.

So if your image has a white box around it, you'll get a white box on the shirt. Export with a transparent background and remove any stray background pixels first.

Multiple shirt sizes on one sheet

If you're printing a run with S, M, L and XL plus a few kids' sizes, one print size usually doesn't fit everyone. A common approach:

Adult sizes share one print size.
The smallest adult sizes and kids' sizes get a slightly smaller print, around 85%.

Both sizes go on the same gang sheet, in the quantities you need.

Packing the sheet

Good packing means:

Leave a small gap between prints so they can be cut cleanly.
Rotate prints 90 degrees when that lets more fit across the width.
Fill each row before starting the next.

Doing this by hand in Illustrator or Canva works, but it's fiddly, and it's easy to drop one print and end up a shirt short.

How Bitgrain builds DTF files

In Bitgrain's shirt print tool, you set the quantity per size and choose DTF as your printer. The download includes:

Gang sheets 58 cm wide, packed automatically, up to 100 cm long each. Prints are rotated when that saves film.
Every print at real size and 300 DPI, with a clear background, and the DPI written into the PNG so print software reads the size correctly.
Single print files too, in case your shop prefers to arrange the sheet themselves.
Notes listing each size group, its print size, the number of sheets and roughly how much film the order uses, so you can check the quote.

A quick checklist before you send

Width matches the shop's sheet.
300 DPI at the real print size.
Transparent background, no white boxes.
Quantities match your size list.
A note saying "print as is, do not scale".

Get those right and DTF is about as painless as printing gets. Try it with your own design at bitgrain.app/apparel.