Setting bleed

For professional printing, bleed extends the printable area beyond the page edge to allow artwork to be trimmed. You can set bleed on document setup, display bleed guides (so you can more easily design into the bleed area) and assign colors to them 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.

For single pages, the terms 'Left' and 'Right' bleed are used, while for facing-page spreads the terms 'Inner' and 'Outer' are used. For the latter, Inner bleed is only relevant for first and last single pages or when exporting (printing) as single pages (rather than spreads).

To set bleed for new documents:
To modify your bleed settings:
  1. From the default context toolbar (or File menu), select Document Setup.
  2. Change bleed values from the Bleed tab.
To view bleed guides:

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

To change the color of bleed guides:
Snapping To snap objects to bleed guides:

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

To switch on bleed marks on export:

Do one of the following:

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