Bleed, trim, slug, crop marks for printing

[baptiste]

(Summarising a few discussions from Discord)

When creating print materials, especially those that need to have full-bleed images and colour background, I could not find an easy way to set up the kind of bleed-trim-crop dimensions that design tools like Acrobat InDesign and co have.

Specifically, I’d be hoping one day to write something like #set page(trim: (13mm,13mm,13mm,13mm), bleed: 3mm, physical-size: (216mm, 303mm), printer-marks: registration + colourswatch).

Ideally bleed, trim, margin should be understood by page() so that content does not need to be offset manually

Crop (and other registration) marks should be an overlay, i.e. part of the page(foreground: ), so they always appear on top of everything.

Related discussions

Sep 2024 - Absolute bleeds on documents for printing

May 2024 - Trim, crop, bleed, slug – setting a page for printing

Github issue

Temporary hack

For the moment I’ve defined some helper functions to place crop marks at the four corners of a page, and set manually horizontal and vertical offsets to obtained the desired output.

This example illustrates the approach:

[EaterOfSnacks]

There’s the added complication of facing pages – crop and registration marks at the outside of pairs of pages, plus imposing the front and rear covers as part of a spread themselves, for example A4 2-up on SRA3 paper for printing…