How to setup for commercial printing with 3mm bleed

[JasonG]

Hi,

The two images show my business card front as it needs to be (how the printers have set it up) and then how it actually is in Xara P&GD 15.



So you can see, I need to extend the blue background 3mm beyond the crop marks. The bleed area is set to 0.3cm, so I see the red rectangle. How do I extend the blue area to the bleed area so my exported pdf looks the same as the one I got back from the printers?

Many thanks, this one's got me stumped!!

Jason

[Boy]

First, go to File/Page Options/Page Size and set the bleed margin to 3 mm. Next, manually extend the blue background to the bleed boundaries.

[JasonG]

thanks for replying, the question is how, exactly, with steps, do I manually extend the blue to the bleed area? If you could help out by providing that information, I would be very grateful.
Jason

[Boy]

Yes, select the blue object and extend it by pulling the middle handels up- and sideways up to the red bleed lines. Make sure that the object is not locked or on a locked layer. To unlock, click on the padlock icon next to the object/layer in the Page & Layer gallery.

[JasonG]

Got it! However, I am seeing some weird behaviour. I have a business card, with 2 pages (front and back). When I extend the page background for page 1 (front of card) all is well, however when I then extend the page background for the 2nd page (back of card) the background for Page 1 reverts to its earlier, unextended, dimensions.

So let's say I have changed the page background of page 1 to be 6.1cm high (was 5.5cm), when I change the page background of page 2 to also be 6.1cm high, the page background of page 1 reverts to being 5.5cm high.

Are you seeing this also? Is there a workaround that doesn't involve having pages in two separate files - a pain for creating the final pdf?

Many thanks.

[mwenz]

Make both page sizes exactly the size that the card will be when trimmed.

In the Options dialog, check the box for Bleed and add the 3mm bleed amount in the Bleed setting. This will add a red line around each page

Extend the blue background rectangle to cover or meet the red line around the pages.

And this is wherein it gets stupid. Because if you now export to PDF and include the bleed, it will not be there.

Start the print process. When the print dialog comes up, click on Option. Switch to the Imagesetting tab. Click on the Output Printer's Marks check box. You can leave the defaults or uncheck all but the crop marks (they are really the Trim marks...). Now click the OK button.

Now Cancel printing.

Now export to PDF. The commercial printing setting will automatically use the crop marks, etc. If you need to modify the PDF export and use the Custom option, on the Layers tab of the PDF export make sure the Include crop and printer's marks checkbox is checked.

[mwenz]

BTW. That 3mm bleed is generally a good idea for what is called a Safe Area. The safe area is an amount of padding between the design and any element, like your bottom line of text, that should not extend within that 3mm area inside the page.