Setting bleed

For professional printing, bleed extends the printable area beyond the page edge to allow artwork to be trimmed. You can set bleed, display bleed guides (so you can more easily design into the bleed area) and then include bleed at print or export time.

Bleed guides

3 mm bleed guides with a placed image snapped to them.

To allow for inaccuracies in the trimming process in professional printing, it's a good idea to extend these elements beyond the 'trim edge' (TrimBox), i.e. the page dimensions defined in Document Setup.

Bleed guides are a visual aid only which assist you in positioning 'bleed' elements (typically images) that you want to run to the edge of a trimmed page. With bleed guides switched on, you can display the printable area extended by the Bleed distance you specify.

An Include bleed setting in the Export PDF or Print dialog includes the bleed in the actual output page size.

Bleed on output

Bleed enabled on PDF export, extending over crop marks.
Document Menu To set bleed:
  1. From the Document Menu, select Bleed.
  2. On the context toolbar, set Left, Right, Top and Bottom bleed values.
Document Menu To view bleed guides:
  1. From the Document Menu, select Bleed.
  2. On the context toolbar, enable Show Bleed.

The guides are shown as a red outline that extends beyond the page edge by the chosen Bleed value.

Document Menu To snap objects to bleed guides:

The Snap to Spread option snaps to page edge and bleed equally.

Document Menu To switch on bleed marks on export:

Do one of the following:

  1. From the Document menu, select Export.
  2. From the dialog, choose a file format to export, e.g. PDF. Choose a Preset, then enable Include bleed.

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