Is there a way to build "bleed" into a file, for printing?

  • I'm making a book via DrawBot, and some of the pages will have a full bleed background color.

    Is there any way to add a bleed into a document (aside from changing my whole layout calculation)?

    I could imagine there being some kind of technique like this:

    W, H = 400, 400
    bleed = 25
    margin = 25
    textBox("Content with margin", (margin, margin, W-margin*2, H-margin*2))

    However, in a quick test, it doesn't seem like that "beyond the edges" content is carried by the PDF into the Adobe Acrobat print > marks and bleeds.

    If there isn't an "easy way," is there a known way? Do I just add a quarter-inch to all pages (except for along the spine), and then just tell the printer to slice that off?

  • admin

  • Is there anything happening in PageBot that would be relevant? I confess to having been too caught up job-hunting and moving/settling to be caught up on where Petr and the other contributors are with the project …

  • Until there's a new feature for this, I think you could replace your newPage() calls to a custom newPageWithBleed() that goes something like this, and wouldn't need to change any of your other drawing code —

    def newPageWithBleed(w, h, bleed):
        newPage(w + bleed * 2, h + bleed * 2)
        translate(bleed, bleed)
    W, H = 400, 400
    bleed = 25
    newPage(W, H)
    rect(0, 0, 20, 20)
    newPageWithBleed(W, H, bleed)
    rect(0, 0, 20, 20)

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