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 Glossary Design Basics Print BasicsPaper Sizes Bleed Paper Types Digital Quality
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BleedFirst an explanation of what Bleed is. If we print 100 copies of an A4 document with colour going all the way to the edge, we will get a pile of paper which needs cutting down to A4. There is often a small movement of the image on the paper, so if the top copy is used as a guide and the pile of paper is cut, there may be some copies with thin white lines on the edge. The only way to overcome this normally is to cut into the image slightly, so instead of producing an A4 document (210 by 297) we get something smaller than A4 (i.e. 209.5 by 296.5). Bleed, solves this problem by increasing the colour on each side by 3mm (usually), so the actual paper size of the A4 will be 216 (210 + 3 + 3) by 303. When the paper is cut to size there will be NO white edges. It is therefore best practise to include 3mm bleed on your document and to have a quiet area of at least 5mm around the edge of the document where you have no text. If for example you put a page number right against the edge of the paper, on some copies it might get cut in half. To set bleed on FilePrint when you upload a PDF, simply click on the Advanced tab, check the bleed box and set the amount of bleed you have. If you don't upload a document with bleed our standard procedure is to increase the size of the whole document by 1%, then cut to size. So 210mm wide document becomes 212 and is then cut to 210, effectively putting 1mm bleed on the document. |
