Fig. 2: Dot contours - from bitmap to printed patterns.

a Top view of the printed dot pattern for Sp. Quarter, created with ink of composition C, is displayed alongside the original bitmap pattern design. Additional dot patterns, featuring varying ink thaumatin concentrations, can be found in Supplementary Fig. 1. Dot diameter was averaged from top view images for surface reconstruction. For illustrative purposes, a side view of the sample and a specific dot (both highlighted in red) is presented in b. This image underwent binarization and image processing. The contours of the selected dot surface (highlighted by the red frame) were fitted with a second-degree polynomial function, with the 95 % confidence interval visualized as a gray hue, as depicted in c. The average contour fittings from all samples with different patterns are visualized in d. By utilizing the extracted radii from (a) and the polynomial fit from d, the dot surface was approximated as a paraboloid, as demonstrated in e. For a comprehensive workflow, please refer to Supplementary Note 1.