The printer rings and says your file “isn’t print-ready”. You exported a PDF, it looks fine on screen, and now there’s a delay and maybe a fee for them to fix it. Or worse, nobody rings, the job runs, and 500 brochures come back with a thin white line down one edge and the phone number half cut off.
Almost every one of those problems comes down to a handful of settings. None of them are hard once you know what they’re for.
The terms, in plain English
Trim size. The finished size of the piece after it’s cut. An A5 flyer has a trim size of 148 × 210 mm.
Bleed. Extra image or colour that runs past the trim edge. Printers don’t print to the exact edge of the paper. They print on a bigger sheet and cut it down, and the guillotine can shift by a fraction of a millimetre. If your background colour stops exactly at the trim line, any shift leaves a white sliver. Bleed gives the blade something to cut through. Most Australian printers ask for 3 mm on every side, so that A5 flyer is set up at 154 × 216 mm. Some ask for more on large formats or bound books, so check their spec sheet.
Safe zone (or quiet area). The inside margin where nothing important should sit. If the cut can drift outward into the bleed, it can drift inward too. We keep text, logos and phone numbers at least 5 mm inside the trim on small pieces, and more on anything folded or bound. Again, your printer may specify their own.
Crop marks (trim marks). Short lines in the corners, outside the bleed, that show where to cut. Your design software adds them on export. Some printers want them, some prefer the file without them and add their own. Ask.
Resolution. How much detail an image holds at the size it’s printed. The standard target for photos in print is 300 pixels per inch at final size. A phone photo can be fine for a postcard and too soft for an A1 poster. What matters is the pixel count compared with the printed size, not the number in the file’s info panel.
CMYK. The four ink colours used in most printing (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). Screens use RGB, which can show brighter colours than ink can. That’s why bright on-screen blues and greens often print duller. Our article on keeping your brand consistent across web, socials and print covers how to keep colours close across both.
PDF/X. A family of PDF standards made for print. PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 are the two you’ll most often see requested. They lock in things like embedded fonts and colour handling so the file prints the way it was designed. If your printer names one, use it.
The mistakes behind most reprints
In our experience, these are the ones that cost money:
No bleed. The file was set up at exact trim size with colour to the edge. Fixing it after the fact means stretching or rebuilding the background, which is never quite as good as doing it from the start.
Text too close to the edge. It looked fine on screen with no margin. After trimming, the website address sits a millimetre from the edge and looks like a mistake.
Low-resolution images. Logos copied from a website or photos pulled from Facebook. Facebook compresses everything, so a photo saved from a post is rarely good enough for print even if the original was. Ask for the original file.
A logo that’s a JPG. It’ll look soft or show a white box around it on coloured backgrounds. Use the vector version (PDF, EPS, AI or SVG) for print. If you don’t have one, that’s worth fixing once, properly.
Fine black text built from four colours. If small black text is made from all four inks, any slight misalignment on press gives it a coloured halo. Small text should be 100% black (K) only. Large black areas often look better as a “rich black” with some other ink added, but ask your printer for their preferred mix rather than guessing, because too much ink can cause drying and smudging problems.
Fonts not embedded. The printer opens the file and the elegant heading has become a default font. Embedding fonts, or converting text to outlines in the final file, prevents it.
Folds in the wrong place. On a tri-fold, the panel that tucks inside has to be slightly narrower than the other two or the paper buckles. If you’re building a folded piece yourself, ask the printer for a template.
Checking your own file before it goes out
Open the exported PDF (not the design file) and go through this list. It takes ten minutes and catches most problems.
- Is the document size trim plus bleed? For A4 with 3 mm bleed, that’s 216 × 303 mm.
- Do backgrounds and images extend all the way into the bleed?
- Is every bit of important text and every logo inside the safe zone?
- Zoom to 200% on each photo. Does anything look blocky or soft?
- Is the logo crisp at high zoom? If it goes fuzzy, it isn’t vector.
- Are fonts embedded? In Adobe Acrobat, File > Properties > Fonts will list them.
- Is it CMYK, unless the printer asked for something else?
- Are crop marks included or left off, as the printer asked?
- Is the page count right for a booklet? Saddle-stitched booklets need a multiple of four.
- Have you proofread the phone number, email, web address and any dates one more time?
That last one isn’t technical, but it’s the one we’d tick twice.
Ask for a proof
Most printers will send a digital proof, and many will run a hard copy proof for a fee. For anything expensive, long or colour-sensitive, pay for the hard proof. Colours on your screen depend on your screen. Colours on paper depend on the paper, the press and the ink, and a hard proof is the only way to see them before the full run.
When you check the proof, look for printing problems rather than design ones. Has anything moved? Is any text cut off? Is the colour within reason? This isn’t the stage for rewriting headings. If you’re still making content changes, you’re not ready to print, and our article on giving design feedback that helps explains how to get those changes sorted earlier.
When to hand it over
If you’re building one-off flyers in Canva or Word, this checklist will get you a long way. Long documents, books and anything with tight folds or special finishes are where a designer who knows print earns their fee. Our roots are in print and publications, and the setup decisions made on day one of a long document save days at the end.
Our graphic design and print team can check a file before it goes to press, or handle the whole job through to the printer. Bleed and resolution problems are cheapest to fix now, so send us the file and the printer’s spec sheet well before the print deadline.