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Tactile Image

any picture, read with your fingers

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Turn any picture into something you can read by touch. A photograph, a map, a scanned plan, a diagram, a logo — drop it in and it becomes a plate for PIAF swell paper, where every black mark rises into a ridge. This is not a halftone: a halftone turns grey into small dots, and under a fingertip small dots are just noise. Instead the picture is simplified and textured — its tones are sorted into two to five bands, each filled with a pattern you can tell apart by touch (smooth, dotted, ruled one way, ruled the other, crossed, solid), with a groove of blank paper between neighbours so no two textures run together. Line work is thinned to its centre and re-drawn at a real ink weight, so every ridge stands the same height, and anything smaller than a fingertip can resolve is dropped rather than printed as a smudge. Every rule is set in millimetres of ink on paper. The title block carries a key — each band’s texture drawn as a swatch at its true pitch, with what it means beside it in print and underneath it in Braille.

The converter reports what it did to the pixels — it does not know what the picture shows. Naming the bands in the key is how meaning gets onto the sheet, and it is worth doing before you print.

Picture

Photos, maps, scanned plans, diagrams, logos — anything your browser can open. Nothing is uploaded; the file is read in this tab and stays there.

Treatment

Light becomes dark — for white-on-black scans.

mm
What a fingertip can read

These are the numbers that make it tactile rather than merely black and white — all in millimetres of ink on paper, the same units a 3D printer is dialled in. A fingertip resolves about 2 mm; ridges closer than that read as one. Anything smaller is dropped rather than printed as a smudge.

No picture yet — drop one in.

The preview converts at about 6.9 pixels per millimetre to stay live under the sliders; every download re-runs the whole conversion at 12 px/mm (≈305 dpi), so nothing you save is the preview enlarged.

Tone bands → textures

Five is the ceiling, not a target — beyond about five textures a hand stops telling them apart.

  • Band 1 · darkest
  • Band 2 · middle
  • Band 3 · lightest
Sheet
Paper (PIAF sheet)
mm

The picture prints 178 by 178 mm — as large as one sheet allows — on ONE sheet of 8.5 × 11 in (letter), portrait, with a 5 mm margin.

Title & key

The key draws each band’s texture as a swatch at the very pitch it is printed at, so a finger can run from the swatch into the picture and check they match. Braille is real dots (1.4 mm on a 6.2 mm cell), true size.

Read-back

What the converter did, in words — kept current as you work, and embedded in the SVG export as its description.

  • No picture yet — drop one in.