Print Margin & Bleed Calculator

Work out artboard, bleed and safe area for a print job.

What you provide

3 mm is standard in most of the world. US printers often ask for 3.175 mm, which is an eighth of an inch.

Result

Set the artboard to 216 × 303 mm

Bleed exists because cutting is not perfect. A stack of paper shifts by a fraction of a millimetre under the guillotine, and without bleed that shift shows as a white sliver along one edge. Extending the background past the trim line by 3 mm gives the blade somewhere to land. The safe area is the same problem from the other direction: text sitting closer than 5 mm to the trim looks crowded on a good cut and gets clipped on a poor one. Export as a PDF with the bleed included and trim marks switched on rather than sending an image the size of the artboard, since a printer needs to know where the trim line actually is.

Diagnostic telemetry
Trim sizeThe finished piece after cutting
210 × 297 mm
Artboard with bleed3 mm on every side
216 × 303 mm
Safe areaKeep text and logos inside this
200 × 287 mm
Artboard at 300 dpi
2551 × 3579 px
Trim at 300 dpi
2480 × 3508 px
Bleed in pixels
35 px each side

What this cannot tell you

  • Dimensional arithmetic from the sizes you enter. It does not check or modify any file.
  • Bleed requirements vary by printer and by product. Confirm the specification with whoever is printing before setting up artwork, since some jobs need considerably more than the usual 3 mm.

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Print Margin & Bleed Calculator on RunTheTests — free browser-based printer tools, no sign-up.