Document setup & bleed

Bleed is the small margin between a design that prints cleanly and one that comes back with white slivers along the edge. This page shows you where the setting lives, how to set it, and how to read the on-canvas guide.

What bleed is#

Two measurements describe every printed piece:

• Trim — the finished size, the line where the guillotine actually cuts.
• Bleed — artwork deliberately extended past the trim edge.

Commercial cutting is never perfect to the millimetre. When the blade drifts slightly and there's no bleed, the cut reveals the unprinted paper underneath as a thin white line. Bleed gives the cutter margin for error: because your background runs past the trim, a small drift still lands on printed artwork.

Bleed only matters for elements that touch the edge — full-bleed backgrounds, photos and color blocks. Anything sitting comfortably inside the page doesn't need it.

Opening Document setup#

Bleed lives in the Document setup… dialog, in the File menu. It's a small panel with three things: the Bleed field, the Show bleed toggle, and a Library visibility toggle (a per-browser preference that hides the off-canvas block and page-template library — unrelated to print).

Changes apply live. There's no separate confirm or apply step — edit the value, watch the canvas update, and click Close when you're done.

Setting a bleed value#

The Bleed field applies a single, uniform bleed to all four sides, entered in the document's units (use millimetres for print). The in-app hint sums it up:

Bleed extends artwork past the trim edge so the cut never leaves a white sliver. It shows as a red guide on canvas and is included in PDF exports.

3 mm is the industry standard and the right default for most jobs — cards, flyers, brochures, labels. Some products want more: die-cut labels, packaging nets and anything with an irregular cut often call for a larger bleed, so check your printer's spec sheet if you have one.

Once a bleed is set, extend every edge-touching element out to the bleed edge. A background that stops exactly at the trim will still risk a sliver — it has to overshoot.

The on-canvas bleed guide#

Turn on Show bleed and the editor draws a thin red boundary sitting the bleed distance outside each canvas's trim edge — the same Illustrator-style convention print designers already know. The trim edge is the canvas border; the red line is where your background needs to reach.

Two things worth knowing:

• The guide only renders when the bleed is greater than zero. Set a bleed first, then the red line appears.
• The Show bleed preference is saved with the document, so it stays on for everyone who opens it. You'll also find the same toggle in the View menu for quick access while you work.

Use the red line as a checklist: scan each canvas and confirm every background actually runs all the way to it.

The safe area#

The editor draws the bleed guide but not a safe-margin guide — that convention is up to you. Keep important content roughly 3–4 mm inside the trim: body text, logos, prices, anything that would look wrong clipped. Just as the cut can drift outward into the bleed, it can drift inward past the trim, and content parked right on the edge risks losing a hair off one side.

So think in three zones: bleed outside the trim, trim itself, and a comfortable safe area inside it.

Bleed in export#

Bleed carries through to your print output. When you open the Export dialog, its Bleed field is seeded from this document-level value, so you rarely have to re-enter it. It stays editable there as a per-export override — handy when one job needs a different bleed than the document default — but setting it once in Document setup… keeps things consistent. The full print export flow is covered in Exporting a print-ready PDF.

Multiple canvases#

Bleed is a document-level setting: one value applies to every canvas in the file. That's usually what you want — a consistent bleed across a multi-page piece. The red guide is your friend here: page through each canvas with Show bleed on and confirm the background reaches the bleed edge everywhere, not just on the first page.

Where to go next#

Set your page dimensions and units first in Canvas size, units & presets, then read What "print-ready" really means for the full picture of a file your printer will accept without a single email back.