How to set bleed for commercial printing [solved]

Question

We are getting a small-but-important print run ready for an order with a market-leading online printer in Europe.

From experience we know that they want the PDF files with 3 mm bleed all around the final size. The final size we want is 135 x 215 mm, so more narrow and taller than A5.

In PTXprint I have set in > Layout the > Page Size to 135mm, 215mm. And in > Finishing I opted for 1-up (because the print-shop will always do their own impagination) and the > Physical Paper Size to 141mm, 221mm. You can do the math: 135mm + 2x 3mm = 141mm. This is our normal workflow when we are using Scribus for DTP with a commercial order.

Obviously I am missing something, and I am new to PTXprint. When I do my pre-flight-check with Acrobat, the document is still being shown (properties) as only 135mm x 215mm, so the "Physical Paper Size" is not beeing applied.


I found one other question https://support.bible/13242/pretore-print-parameters-and-ptxprint?show=13242#q13242  where the advice is given, to activate the option > Finishing > Crop Marks. So I tried that option but that went very badly wrong:

• For starters I know that our commercial print shops in Europe do not want crop marks, it is in their documentation. And all the other "decorations" they do not want either, I guess because it wastes toner or reduces the quality of their recycling-paper and is irrelevant for their workflows.
• The size of the paper comes out as 160.4mm x 240.4mm. Since the way those shops work, is to always cut exactly 3 mm "all" around, this would give us a final page-size of 154.4mm x 234.4mm and not our needed size of 135mm x 215mm. And I know from experience that my order would be rejected by an automatic e-mail.

So I believe you got the picture. How can I set PTXprint to get the output we need please?: 3mm of bleed all around (4 sides) added to the final Page Size, so it can be cut off after printing and binding.

I have searched the tool in the search-settings box and found that PTXprint does know about bleed, but I can only find it for the cover (we will be doing our cover in another DTP tool), not for the inner pages. I have searched this forum and found two questions; one where a user is hacking some tex-file and is using dimensions in pt. That is beyond my experience and I would be willing to hack. But I would need clear instructions please, if the solution involves tweaking some XeTeX innards.

I have considered a solution, where I manually calculate and set a larger page-size. Then I would have to tweak all the margins such, that we will have 3mm of clear bleed that can be cut off and give us the final page-size we need. When I look at the "Margins" area, there are many options, and helpful arrows in colors. So if I want to tweak the blue-arrow margins and add my 3mm that would be very indirect. And I have not figured out how the binding gutter, the outer gutter and the side margins work and work-together. I can click around (and I did some) but would prefer to hear from some veteran user of PTXprint.


TL/DR:

We will be using Wir-machen-Druck. That is a huge company with some 656 staff, 100 locations in Europe, 2+ million customers, 59000+ products and very fair pricing, because fully automated. So please do not tell me "You want to do it differently". It would be best, if the output-PDF would respect the norms for printing, and the bleed would not just be extra margins but actually be defined as bleed by the PDF-concept of TrimBox and such. The company will not change their work-flow for our Bible-portions, when they process 25000 orders per day. And we are very happy there, have used them for several years, for flyers, books, t-shirts, book-marks etc.

They give very clear instructions and when we abide by those, we normally get very good results. If possible, I will upload a typical instruction sheet. It is in German, but you can read it. I have cut pages off the document and have cropped, so that you will only see the inside pages (Inhaltsseiten) which relate to this question. [I could not find how to upload a file, so I will paste an image here.]



You may be amazed by the fact that they want bleed even on the insides, where the binding will be happening; and where the normal bleed-trimming will not be done. That is because they operate a park of different machines and locations and give the customer different options for binding, like "glue" or "string-bound". So they will decide before production what machine is available and will do the impagination accordingly. They even automatically apply a paper thickness correction, depending on binding, so that the content (the black stuff) will be aligned on all pages, independend of where a page is within a section.

In the past 20 years we have used different online-digital-print-shops in Europe. I can report that their way of handling bleed and of prescribing in great details how they want the PDF-files is quite consistent. So what I am asking today is nothing exotic or weird, but rather totally mainstream. You can have a look for yourself. I noticed that wir-machen-druck are now using geoblocking, so if you go there from another continent, consider using a VPN-tool.

A final detail: This is somewhat urgent, because we have international travel coming up and are committed to a certain print run for a "special occasion". We have the funding and this must happen. I need to know now please, in the beginning, that PTXprint can handle the basic layout, or I need to allow extra time for post-processing in some other tool like Acrobat, which would be sad and will potentially introduce errors.

thank you

 

Answer 1

Hello Tim,

Thank you for the long and detailed question. As you correctly noted, we do use bleed on the cover page artwork, but not on the text content pages.

Usually if there's something like this that is needed, we can jump in there and add the feature as needed. However, this request could not have come at a worse time! The development team is just about to travel, and will be engaged with various workshops right up until the end of May.

So, if you need this soon, then go ahead and manually add 3mm (to the current margins) and adjust the page size accordingly. If done correctly, it will not affect the layout at all; and if in the future we manage to add an option for a bleed for the interior pages as well, then you would be able to remove the excess 3mm and set the option. But don't wait for us to do so.

There's a slight chance that someone lurking on this list will think up a TeX snippet that will solve your problem; but I wouldn't count on it.

Answer 2

What are you needing to bleed? We do already support bleeds. To get them you need to turn on crop marks and then the PDF will be output with separate mediabox and trimbox. Thumbtabs are output into the bleed. Covers also stretch into their bleeds. Printers tend to want crop marks. The reason I mention what do you want to bleed is that we don't do background colours on the main page and so the only bleeding is white. While the printer is talking about bleeds they are really talking about cut regions that give them the necessary cut variability they need for their various presses.
We could and might automate this, but for now you can achieve the same thing by, as you say, increased page size and increased margins. If you are using thumbtabs you will want to give the thumbtabs the extra size to stretch across the extra bleed area. We do already bleed them by 3mm but that only shows if you are outputting crop marks.

So what I would do in your case is set my paper size to 141mm, 221mm (you can type this into the page size box in the layout settings, just as it is here) and then increase the margins by 3mm all round. My inference of the pixelated German is that you are required to have at least 5mm margin on top of that so overall > 8mm. So increase the margins by 3mm (since they are applied to both sides of the page) and also the top and bottom margins. If this cannot work for you and you must have a trimbox that is inside the mediabox to give the real trim, get back to us and we'll work something out, but I suspect they don't even look at those boxes in the PDF. In answer to your question as to how side margins work. It is this: the margin sets the margins for inner/outer to be the same (the margin value). The gutter margin is added to the inner margin unless the outer gutter is set in which case it is added to the outer margin instead.

BTW most projects start with a paper size, then acknowledge the trim within that and so simply increase their margins accordingly. But you can do as you are doing and work backwards from an intended page layout size and add on the trim.

In summary. Yes PTXprint can handle it. If it can't today, we can make it so that it will. Go ahead. I would try what I have proposed here first and then get back to us if there are still problems. BTW the PTXprint team will be travelling over the next few weeks as well, so our response times may not be as we would like them.

So do Wir-machen-Druck handle thin paper (< 50gsm)? Is this a commercial job? In the commerical world, money tends to help encourage priorities.

Answer 3

I thank @Mark P and @mhosken for their detailed answers. It has happened to me before, that I had overlooked an existing feature in PTXprint, as a new user. So I wanted to be sure, before I arrange our need for a bleed manually. I will now follow their advice and will manually do the math and will solve the need with extra margins and with personal notes in my files.

So this question can be marked as "solved" if this feature is available on this forum.

For the record: I was asking for bleed as a noun, not as a verb. @mhosken has asked back "what are you needing to bleed?" And for this case, the answer is "nothing visible". It is a requisite of the print-shops that we provide in our PDF an area of extra 3 mm all around our "final page size". When I use Scribus there is a feature, and they are calling that area "bleed" in the English-language-GUI.

To be complete: In German, there are several technical terms for the area that is available to design elements like background-photos, or background-color-areas beyond the final page-size; with the intend to cut off this area during production and have a clean result without any white showing. 

I looked it up: The terms used are "Beschnittzugabe", "Beschnittrand", "Beschnitt" or "Anschnitt".  When I feed these terms into DeepL Pro, it gives me "Bleed allowance", "Bleed margin", "Bleed", "Printed edge" and the capitalization is not mine. We would need a technical dictionary for printing and design and publishing to make sure that we talking internationally without misunderstandings. I do not have one available, sorry.


And I also looked up the issue of "printers tend to want crop marks" versus my statement of "I know that ... do not want crop marks". We are both right: The printers in Europe do not want the crop marks from their customers. They do their own impagination, depending on many parameters and only then do they add crop marks if and as needed. If you want to read an entire page about this subject, here is a link; you can certainly auto-translate it:
An information page about registration marks
The pertinent information is this sentence (they are using "registration marks" as a generic term, including the actual registration-marks, crop marks, as well as folding-marks and color-samples): 

At WIRmachenDRUCK, however, you don’t have to do anything in this regard, as we automatically add the necessary registration marks to your print files before printing.

And there was a follow-up question about thin paper (< 50 g/m²). [Have you ever noticed that you cannot see any of the previous answers, when you answer a question in this forum? Not very helpful.] We have never needed such paper, so I did not know. But I went and had a look for you:
     The way printing works in Europa, for the low-budget customers like our project, is that features and extras are not global, but get displayed on the web-interface "as per product". So since our print-shop is offering some 400+ product groups and some 60000 possible variations, I cannot easily look that up in general. 

If we filter this to "small books, with hard cover and 4/4 color in CMYK and 80 pages content" then the thinnest paper they are offering is 90 g/m². If you look at their machines, and if you remember that they produce some 25000 orders per day, you might see why special delicate paper is not so suited to their business and target-customers.



The way I have understood PTXprint so far (there is a nice video about the benefits) is that it enables projects to produce their own paper-versions of projects at several stages. For (community)testing, for encouragement, for niche-audiences for portions. Seems that the users of PTXprint are not mainly professional typesetters whose job it is to prepare entire Bible-editons for commercial print-runs. Correct me, if I got that wrong. If you prepare a portion with less than 500 pages, for example "The story of David" or "The Psalms" there is no need to pay extra for thin paper, and to have a rather delicate book with special paper, unless you want to train an audience to handle such paper. 
     I was glad that on this forum there was mention of a special company (I believe in the Netherlands) who specialize in Bible production and thin paper; but that is far from our present need and from my question about how to handle bleed in PTXprint.

I had to smile about the wisdom of "In the commerical world, money tends to help encourage priorities." Very true. We are not playing in that league. "In the Bible world, money tends to be limited." I had shared that whatever we want or do, the print-companies in our price-range will not change their workflow for our requests or needs. The do have reasonable customer service. For example if you need extra quick delivery or if they made a mistake, or if the customer made a mistake, you can typically reach a real human being and find a solution that is win-win. But we can never change any technical aspects beyond their offered product-range, even if we wanted to pay double. We would need to find a classic small-print-shop, and those are less easy to contact intercontinentally, I guess; not sure how they operate their customer-interaction these days.


Hope that some of this exchange is useful to other users. It goes beyond the handling of PTXprint. Still there is "print" in the name of the tool, and I guess that not all output is done on local laser printers. Greetings.

Comments

Thanks for the input. On the question of paper, 80 gsm is typically 0.1mm thick so 500 pages would be 1 inch thick, which is OK, but 1300 pages for a full bible would be 2.5 inches which is quite a brick. That is why we are always looking for POD printers capable of printing on thin paper.

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Yes, I know what you are saying. My trusted reference book for Linux by Michael Kofler has grown during 30 years and 19 editions to a size of 2400 pages. The last edition that I bought on paper was 2011, and back then they added a free digital version. Now I only buy the PDF version and take it along, when I travel.

The print-shops that we are using in Europe all offer a thickness-calculator for each product where it makes sense. Each is precisely tuned to the selected paper stock and to the chosen way of binding. The customers need this information so that they can design the book spines.
We always enjoy when we have created a book that presents a "real spine", having more than a few dozen pages. (Mostly we make only booklets and can have them stapled.) So far those calculations were always correct.