Affinity Publisher: Bleed hazard

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

Although touching does not mean going over the edge, it is enough for a text frame to touch the edge to cause Affinity Publisher to erroneously announce a risk of the text overflowing onto the bleed.

This leads to a lot of time wasted in unnecessary checks.

This phenomenon also occurs when the text frame contains an inset and the text is aligned with the corresponding border.

[Old Bruce]

This is because in practice the edge of the page may get trimmed narrow or wide. In which case there may be text sliced or a colour that does not go all the way to the edge of the printed and trimmed paper. There are tolerances for trimmed page sizes in print shops, they are small but that is what the bleed is there for.

[walt.farrell]

39 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

There are tolerances for trimmed page sizes in print shops, they are small but that is what the bleed is there for.

I'm not an expert, but I have always thought the bleed was to allow for wide trimming. If the trimming can be narrow, then what is a safe border area on the inside of the page? Is it the same as the bleed on the outside, or something different?

[Old Bruce]

21 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I have always thought the bleed was to allow for wide trimming.

If it is wide on one side of the spread/signature/page then the opposite side of the spread/signature/page will be narrow. There are then differences with how the trimming is done for Web Presses vs Sheet Presses.

Placing text right on the edge of the page means some copies will have that text cut off.

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Placing text right on the edge of the page means some copies will have that text cut off.

Thanks. Wouldn't that be true for anything placed on the edge? Of course, for some items (photos) it might not be noticeable, but it might also be noticeable for some vector designs or shapes (losing an edge of a rectangle, or a vertex of a triangle, etc.).

[PaulEC]

25 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Placing text right on the edge of the page means some copies will have that text cut off.

What I don't get is why anyone would want text that went right up to the edge of a page! Strikes me as pretty poor design, but I suppose each to his own! 😕

[Pyanepsion]

There is actually a bleed area outside the edges of the page and a margin area inside the edges of the page.

Bleed area = One must make overflow all the objects until the external edge of the zone of cut to avoid ending up with an unsightly white during a bad cut. It usually varies between 1 and 5 mm depending on the quality of the material.

Margin area = The margin zone is, on the other hand, a safety zone on which nothing important should be placed. It is generally wider inside the book because of the binding. It varies between 2.5 and 5 mm on the outer edges, and between 5 and 25 mm on the binding side.

Bleed hazard = Here, we are talking about the bleed area, not the margin area..

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

Margin area = The margin zone is, on the other hand, a safety zone on which nothing important should be placed. It is generally wider inside the book because of the binding. It varies between 2.5 and 5 mm on the outer edges, and between 5 and 25 mm on the binding side.

I am not sure that Publisher has the concept of a Margin "safety" area. I think it treats the Margin more as a simple visual design concept, which is always how I've considered it. (But note that I am not a professional printer.)

Publisher seems to consider the Bleed as applying on both sides of a page edge (that is, inside and outside the edge), but asymmetrically. On the right (outside) edge of a page, if you have a Bleed outside the edge of "x" mm, then you also have a text bleed area inside the edge of "x"-1.5 mm. If text is placed within "x"-1.5mm of the edge, there's a warning. So, with a 3mm Bleed outside the page edge, text within 1.5 mm of the edge is flagged as having a Bleed hazzard.

If the bleed were 5 mm, then text within 3.5 mm of the edge would have a Bleed hazzard warning.

[Wosven]

5 hours ago, PaulEC said:

What I don't get is why anyone would want text that went right up to the edge of a page! Strikes me as pretty poor design, but I suppose each to his own! 😕

Pergaps you never notice documents using extra large text as decoration, going out in the bleed, or smaller text repeated multiple times as decoration and going out of the page. Or full background made of a pattern of characters... It's not a poor design, it's a choice, done by people playing with fonts and the characters themself.

[Wosven]

An option to exclude some frames from being checked and flagged as errors would be nice, the same wat we can exclude words from spell checking without having to add them to the personal dictionary.

[Old Bruce]

18 minutes ago, Wosven said:

An option to exclude some frames from being checked and flagged as errors would be nice, the same wat we can exclude words from spell checking without having to add them to the personal dictionary.

There are ways to build the text frame so the page number will be where it is and not have a warning generated. My quick look at it makes me suspect that that some page numbers will be cut off.

[Pyanepsion]

19 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

My quick look at it makes me suspect that that some page numbers will be cut off.

Actualy, care has been taken here to follow the printer’s recommendations to the letter by using an insert that exceeds the minimum margin of security width. That said, the issue here is the erroneous warning that there is a risk of overflow in the bleed area when technically it must the best to be described as a risk of overflow in the margin of security area.

It would be nice if Serif would integrate the fundamental notion of safety zone, because it is the core of printing, and it is not at all identical in negative to the cutting zone. This is the minimum to expect from a software that wants to be professional!

21 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I am not sure that Publisher has the concept of a Margin "safety" area.

In Publisher, this ‘security’ role is more logically assigned to the use of guides. These are more appropriate to visualize it effectively when building the layout. As for the term ‘margin’ used without Publisher, it is rather the comfort margins, also called visual margins or (I prefer) writing margins.

[PaulEC]

11 hours ago, Wosven said:

Pergaps you never notice documents using extra large text as decoration, going out in the bleed, or smaller text repeated multiple times as decoration and going out of the page. Or full background made of a pattern of characters... It's not a poor design, it's a choice, done by people playing with fonts and the characters themself.

I realise this, (I've done it myself) but, in these cases, as you say, the text is actually decoration, not text that needs to be read like normal text. If it's used as decoration then it is usually desirable for it go into the bleed area.

What I am saying is that if you are using text as normal text, intended to be read as text, (even if it's just a page number) there is no point in worrying about taking it right up to the edge of the page, especially as in most (all?) printing processes there will be a slight margin of error/tolerance when the paper is trimmed. (Which is the whole point of having a bleed area!) IMHO any text (which is not purely decorative) should have at least a small amount of white space between it and the edge of the page, but, like I said, each to his own!

[Pyanepsion]

@PaulECEveryone probably agrees on the principle, but you are confusing (and also Serif) the bleed area (outside the edge) with the (safety) margin (inside the edge).

[Wosven]

On 12/21/2021 at 11:49 PM, Old Bruce said:

There are ways to build the text frame so the page number will be where it is and not have a warning generated. My quick look at it makes me suspect that that some page numbers will be cut off.

I never mentioned page numbers in this post, because it wasn't about them

[Pauls]

in the preflight profile I believe you can set a custom zone to zero mm to prevent the warning in this case.

[Pyanepsion]

This is not a good idea. There are actually three safety zones, and they are often of different widths:
- one on the outside (in red, at Amazon it is for example 0.125"), and one on the inside (in orange, at Amazon it is 0.250") of the theoretical edge of the sheet.
- and another on the binding side (in yellow, of variable width depending on the number of sheets in the booklet or book).
The cut can be made anywhere on the red and orange.

The problem here is that Affinity Publisher considers the orange area (safety area, internal) to be the negative value of the red area (bleed area, external).

 

[walt.farrell]

58 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

The problem here is that Affinity Publisher considers the orange area (safety area, internal) to be the negative value of the red area (bleed area, external)

Not in my experimenting (mentioned above). I found that the orange area, on the outer edge, is the red area - 1.5mm (when the document is using mm units).

[Pauls]

the custom safe zone should correspond with the orange area - you can alter it in the bleed hazard preflight settings

[Pyanepsion]

14 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Not in my experimenting (mentioned above). I found that the orange area, on the outer edge, is the red area - 1.5mm (when the document is using mm units).

No. You get this -1.5 mm result because your bleed area around the edge of the page is 1.5 mm.

The real problem, however, is that this principle is completely wrong. The width of the bleed area and the safety margin area have very little to do with each other. I cited the example of Amazon (because they sell worldwide) with 0.125" [bleed] and 0.250" [safety] respectively. I could also cite my main printer with 3 mm [bleed] and 5 mm [safety] for some jobs and 5 mm [bleed] and 10 mm [safety] for others.

20 minutes ago, Pauls said:

the custom safe zone should correspond with the orange area - you can alter it in the bleed hazard preflight settings

So, texts using the correct names should be corrected. This is what Amazon calls them: it is not the most consensual, although it is very understandable.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle-publication/KDP_Print_File_Setup_Calculator_V5._CB1538598659_.xlsm

[Pyanepsion]

I think I understand the problem with the values of the cut. It is the result of several design differences with the standard.
1. The bleed area (red) is correctly defined by Affinity Publisher when creating the document, but the (very well thought out terms) terms inner, outer, top, bottom can create confusion with margin. The bleed area is usually (but not always, so keep the terms inner, outer, top, bottom) the same around the edges of the sheet and the 4 values are often identical.
2. The safety zone (orange), which Amazon aptly calls outside margin (very well thought out terms), is not defined by Affinity Publisher when creating pages.
3. The binding zone (yellow), which Amazon aptly calls the gutter margin (very well thought out terms), is not set by Affinity Publisher when creating pages. However, this is impossible to define until the number of sheets of paper and their thickness are known.

Then.
4. The margin area (green) which defined when creating the document is actually the useful area of the text box.

With these basics in place, there is some confusion.
5. The warning about the overflow area of the safety zone (orange) is calculated in relation to the bleed area (red). This is a mistake, as the safety zone (orange) can be larger or smaller than the bleed area (red).
6. The Safety Zone Overflow (orange) alert is incorrect as the message refers to the bleed (red) zone.