Guidelines for Digital Print
When presenting copy for Digital Printing, a common issue is the lack of bleed and understanding what bleed is and why you need it. The following explanation covers this and other considerations plus a sample image below showing bleed applied correctly and incorrectly to illustrate.
Digital presses cannot print to the edge of the paper, so to produce finished A3 material, or smaller items, SRA3 is used which can then also accommodate a bleed and is then trimmed to size.
Where any page elements extend to the edge of the finished material, such as images or coloured background, a bleed of at least 3mm is required. In this sample layout you can see the crop marks on each corner that indicate the finished printed size. Colour or images should extend out of that area to the surrounding box that is indicating the 3mm bleed area on all sides.
Top, left and bottom sides below have the bleed applied correctly and can be printed and then trimmed to size. On the right side the elements do not extend into the bleed area which is indicated by the black box surrounding the layout. On that side after printing and then trimming white edges may show and spoil the appearance of the finished item.
Why? You may ask. Well, in a perfect world bleed would not be necessary, however, in this world, paper moves slightly as it travels through a printing press. So without bleed, when the stack of paper is trimmed, one sheet may be slightly to one side compared to the following one creating a white edge where there should be colour, even just 0.5mm difference will be noticeable. With the correct bleed applied as described, these slight variations will not matter and the finished result will be perfect!
Example of correct and incorrect bleed settings
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