Print Bleed Calculator

What is Print Bleed?

A bleed is not a margin. A margin is empty paper inside the finished size; a bleed is extra artwork outside it, so that when the guillotine drifts by a fraction of a millimetre the background still reaches the edge instead of leaving a white sliver. A commercial printer typically asks for 3 mm on every edge, with the document delivered 6 mm larger in each dimension than the finished size, and expects nothing important within 3 mm of the trim line. The document that goes to press is therefore larger than the document you designed.

How it works

The document size is the trim size plus the bleed on both axes — because the artwork extends past the trim on all four edges, the total grows by twice the bleed in each direction. The safe margin, the distance inside the trim that text should keep to, is the greater of the bleed amount and 3 mm, since a smaller safe area than the press tolerance is no safe area at all. The diagram is drawn from the real numbers, so the widths of the three bands are proportional to the sheet, and the common settings — no bleed for digital, 1 mm for a tight digital press, 3 mm commercial, 5 mm on heavy stock — are tabulated against the trim size you entered.

1. Enter your input. Type or paste your input into the field above — the tool responds instantly.
2. Review the result. Output updates live as you type. Everything runs entirely in your browser.
3. Copy or download. Use the Copy button to grab the result, or Download to save it as a file.

Examples

Realistic sample

Type or paste any realistic input — the tool computes the result locally and instantly.

Common mistakes

Expecting a server round-trip

Nothing is uploaded — every tool in this category runs entirely in your browser.