Reply To: Is bleed required in all cases

Bleed is only required when objects are needed to be printed right to the edge of the page.

If you only put the object right up against the edge of the page you could end up with white slivers where the guillotine misses the exact edge.

As you can see from the image – the paper is stacked as such when printed. It can shift by up to 5mm left, right, up or down, in EXTREME cases. Usually a 3mm bleed is sufficient to counteract this.

There's a lot of movement when the paper is fed into a printing machine (see picture below). It is then stacked on the other side of the printing machine and again it might not be aligned exactly on top of each other.

The Guillotine operator then takes that paper and cuts it in smaller stacks, as all that paper would not fit in the guillotine. So again there is manual movement of the paper, where it's stacked as carefully as possible.

The bleed is there so there is an extra bit of colour about 3 to 5mm outside the page area. Where if any movement from press to guillotine occurs, or even on a folding maching, that when the paper is trimmed they have a bit of wiggle room.

This is what the paper looks like on a printing press. The vaccuum cups pick up a piece of paper one at a time and it's fed into the machine, and it is again stacked on the opposite end of the machine.