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.
- 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.
Take this with you
How this calculation works
The trim size is the finished piece. Bleed is added on every side so that any background running to the edge continues past where the blade lands, and the safe margin is subtracted so that text sits comfortably inside the cut. Everything is then converted to pixels at the resolution you choose, which is what a raster editor needs to be set up correctly before you start rather than after.
What the results mean
- Artboard with bleed
- The document size to work at. Background artwork should extend all the way to these edges even though it will be cut off.
- Safe area
- Where text and logos belong. Anything closer to the trim than this looks crowded on a good cut and gets clipped on a poor one.
- Pixel dimensions
- The canvas size for a raster editor at your chosen resolution. Set this before you begin, since enlarging a raster document afterwards costs quality.
Common problems and fixes
- The printer rejected the file for having no bleed
- Extending the canvas is not enough on its own. The background artwork itself has to reach the new edges, so a photograph or a colour block needs to be enlarged into the bleed area rather than sitting inside the trim with white around it. Export as PDF with bleed included and trim marks switched on, so the printer knows where the trim line is.
- Text was cut off on the finished job
- It was inside the safe margin. Cutting tolerance on a guillotine is typically one to two millimetres either way across a stack, and anything closer than about 5 mm to the trim edge will eventually get clipped on some copies. Move text inward and treat the safe area as a hard boundary rather than a suggestion.
Frequently asked questions
How much bleed do I need?
3 mm is standard for most commercial printing in metric regions, and an eighth of an inch is the equivalent convention where inches are used. Large-format work, packaging and anything folded or bound often needs more, so confirm with the printer before setting up the file.
What resolution should print artwork be?
300 dpi at final size for anything read at arm length. Large-format work viewed from a distance can be much lower, often 100 to 150 dpi, because the viewing distance does the work. Scaling a 72 dpi screen image up to print size never recovers the detail that was never captured.
Do I need bleed on white artwork?
Not if the background is genuinely the paper colour, since a slight cutting shift moves white against white and nobody sees it. The moment any element touches the edge, including a border or a coloured panel, bleed becomes necessary. Borders in particular are the worst case, because an uneven cut makes an unequal border obvious.
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