Help · Printing & exporting
Bleed and margins for print
If you have never sent anything to a commercial printer, these two words look like the same idea. They are opposites.
Bleed is extra artwork outside the page. Printing is cut with a blade and the blade moves by a fraction of a millimetre, so if your background stops exactly at the page edge, a slight miss leaves a white sliver. Bleed gives the blade somewhere to land. Standard is 0.125 inch on every side.
Margins are a keep-out zone inside the page. They stop your type ending up so close to the trim that it looks like an accident, or vanishing into the fold of a book.
Set them
- Click Page Setup in the left rail.
- Under Margin guides, tick Same on all sides and type one number, or untick it and set Top, Bottom, Left and Right separately.
- Set Bleed (print). Use
0for anything staying on screen,0.125for a commercial printer,0.25if your printer has asked for a wide bleed.
You can also choose the bleed when you first create the project — the dropdown offers None, 0.125in — standard print / KDP and 0.25in — wide bleed.
What you see on the page
- Margins appear as thin guides inside the page. Toggle them with Show margin guides, or from View → Margins.
- Bleed appears as a red line outside the page, labelled with its size. Toggle it with Show bleed guides, or from View → Print bleed.
The two rules that matter
Nothing clips to the margins. They are guides. You can put anything anywhere; the guide is advice, and it never prints. If you want it enforced, tick Snap to margins.
Everything clips to the bleed line. Artwork may run out to the bleed line and stops there, giving one clean edge all the way round — standard professional print behaviour. So to get a colour that truly reaches the trimmed edge, drag it out past the page edge until it meets the red line.
> Note > Only the PDF export includes the bleed. PNG, JPG, WebP, SVG and printing from the app > all trim to the page, because nobody wants a quarter-inch of extra background around their > wallpaper. If a printer has asked you for bleed, send them a PDF.
What a printer usually asks for
- 0.125 inch bleed on all four sides.
- Artwork running to the bleed line, not to the page edge.
- Nothing important within about 0.25 inch of the trim — that is what your margins are for.
- A PDF at the document's true size.
Crevano does not add crop marks. Most printers, and Amazon KDP, ask for a bleed PDF without them.