Release
JVector 3.0 — from the screen to the press
JVector started as a way to make your first steps into vector graphics easier. Version 3.0 keeps that promise, but it adds something I kept running into in my own work: the moment a drawing stops being a picture on a screen and has to become a physical thing — a cut line on a plotter, a DTF transfer, a printed sheet with marks around it.
That is what most of this release is about.
Prepress: output you can actually hand over
There is a new Prepress tab in the ribbon, and everything a printer normally asks for now lives there.
- Crop marks — hairline, pure K:100, placed around the page or around the selection. Mark length and the distance from the trim edge are yours to set, in the document’s current units.
- Registration targets — the classic circle-and-cross, 3 mm, centred on each edge.
- Colour bar — a C·M·Y·K·Registration strip below the page, written as exact channels on export.
- Registration colour — apply it to any object and it lands on every plate.
- Fold marks — put ruler guides exactly where the folds go, and JVector turns them into marks.
The other half of this is the export itself. PDF can now be written in DeviceCMYK, so a print-true build comes out the way you built it: black is K100, greys stay on the K plate alone, and nothing gets a muddy four-colour rebuild behind your back. Text is converted to curves on export, so fonts are never a question. RGB output is still there for anything screen-bound — it is a switch in the export dialog, not a different workflow.
Print sizes were raised as well, for wallpaper- and DTF-scale jobs.
One document, many pages
The Pages panel turns a document into a multi-page one. Add, delete and rename pages, see them as thumbnails, and switch with the page tabs at the bottom of the canvas. A PDF export writes all of them, in order, as one vector file.
A workspace that gets out of the way
The panels were rebuilt. Instead of a fixed column, there is a rail on the right side that opens each panel where you need it — and every panel is a real, self-contained tool:
Transform (move, rotate, skew, corners, size), Align, Distribute, Stroke, Contour, Blend, Drop Shadow, Pages, Layers and Properties.
Transform operations can also leave a copy behind — rotate a duplicate, skew a duplicate, move a duplicate — which is how most repeating patterns get built in the first place.
Layers got smaller but welcome manners: Alt-click a layer to solo it, double-click its name to rename it, and expand a group to reach the objects inside it.
Paths, shapes, and the things you do to them
- Corner effects — Fillet (round), Chamfer (bevel) and Scallop (concave), applied to the corners you select.
- Contour — offset a path outward for a cut line or a halo, or inward to inset it inside the object.
- Blend — N steps between two objects.
- Merge, Trim, Split — the boolean operations were rewritten on top of real curve-to-curve intersections, so unions and differences no longer flatten your curves into a crowd of points. Fewer nodes is not a cosmetic detail when a plotter has to follow them.
- Text → Curves — convert text to vector outlines, in any font.
- Object → Path — turn a rectangle or an ellipse into an editable path when you need the nodes.
Strokes that carry information
The Stroke panel now covers weight, caps and joins, dash presets (dashed, dotted, dash-dot — scaled to each object’s stroke width, so they read the same at any weight) and line-end markers: arrowheads on the start and the end of open paths and lines.
Still the same thing underneath
JVector is free, it runs in the browser, and it is a single file — no account, no install, and no connection needed once the page has loaded. Open it, and it is there.