How to set up bleed, trim and safe areas for a print-ready book

Every printed page starts life bigger than the finished book. The printer prints on large sheets, then cuts them down to size. Three lines on your page decide how that cut turns out: the trim line, the bleed and the safe area. Get them right once and every page prints the way you designed it.

The trim line

The trim line is the finished size of your book, the edge of the page your reader will hold. A 6 x 9 inch novel has a 6 x 9 inch trim. A landscape picture book that is 10 inches wide and 8 inches tall has a 10 x 8 inch trim.

Set your document to the trim size first. Everything else is measured from it.

Bleed

Cutting machines are precise, but not perfect. Over a stack of hundreds of pages, the blade can drift by a hair. If your background color or photo stops exactly at the trim line, that tiny drift can leave a thin white sliver along the edge.

Bleed solves this. It is an extra 0.125 inch (one eighth of an inch) of art on every outside edge, past the trim line. That strip gets cut away, so any drift cuts into art instead of into blank paper.

So a 6 x 9 inch page with bleed is exported at 6.25 x 9.25 inches: 0.125 inch added on the left, right, top and bottom.

A few things to know:

• Only art that touches the edge needs bleed. A page of text with white margins is fine without anything extending into the bleed. It still needs to be exported at the bleed size, with the extra area left white.
• Stretch backgrounds, do not shrink pages. Extend the photo or color past the trim line. Do not scale the whole page down to make room.
• Hardcover cases are different. The art on a hardcover case wraps around the board, so it needs a wider wrap area instead of bleed. Our cover template shows exactly how much.

The safe area

If bleed protects the edge of your art, the safe area protects everything important. Keep text, page numbers, faces and logos at least 0.25 inch inside the trim line. Then even a small drift in the cut never clips a word.

For covers, think of each panel separately. Keep text inside the front, the back and the spine, and away from the folds between them.

Setting it up in your app

Adobe InDesign. When you create the document, set the page size to your trim size and Bleed to 0.125 inch on all sides. Use margins of at least 0.25 inch for your text. When you export, choose a PDF/X preset and tick Use Document Bleed Settings.

Affinity Publisher. In the new document settings, set the page size to your trim and add 0.125 inch bleed. On export, choose PDF (press ready) and turn on Include bleed.

Canva. Set a custom size at your trim size, then turn on View, then Show print bleed. Stretch background elements to the outer edge. Download as PDF Print and tick Crop marks and bleed.

Microsoft Word. Word has no bleed setting. Set the page size to the full bleed size (6.25 x 9.25 inches for a 6 x 9 book) and keep your margins generous, at least 0.375 inch, so text stays inside the safe area. For books with art that runs to the edge, a layout app is a better fit, or we can format your pages for you.

Check before you upload

Open your PDF and look at the page size. It should be your trim size plus 0.25 inch in each direction. When you upload, our file check measures every page and tells you in plain words if anything is off, with the fix. If art stops at the trim line, our AI tools can often extend it into the bleed for you. You see every change first, and nothing is used unless you approve it.

Not sure where to start? Download the free template for your exact book from the spec picker. It has the trim, bleed and safe area marked on every page.