[Publisher] Formatting around a No-Ink Gutter Area?

[McNelly]

Hello!

This barely pertains to Affinity itself so I hope it is alright to post this, truthfully I'm just hoping some of you more experienced designers might work with print more and might be able to help me here.

I am formatting a children's book to be published on Ingram Sparks. In their documentation, they mention that they include a 3mm no-ink gutter area where the pages are glued together. I believe Barnes and Nobles uses the same printer, and in their preview of the final print PDF, they have cropped 3mm off the fold-side of my images.

The book in question has a lot of double-spread illustrations. Now I have heard different things around the web as to whether this no-ink zone has to be considered when formatting, or whether I should go and upload the spreads as they are - filling out the whole page with 0.125 inch bleed. It sounds to me though that it is likely keeping them as is is going to get content cropped out of the middle and make the pages join weird?

So I'm wondering if anyone knows what the best practise around this is. To clarify, here are what I think my options are.

I can leave the spreads as they are:

 

 

Or I can space them apart a little so that they would join together again if one ignored the no-ink zone...

 

Sorry again if this is the completely wrong forum for this! Otherwise I'd be much obliged for any insight. Thank you!

 

 

 

[stokerg]

Hi @McNelly,

2 hours ago, McNelly said:

I believe Barnes and Nobles uses the same printer, and in their preview of the final print PDF, they have cropped 3mm off the fold-side of my images.

If thats the case, i would go for the 2nd option you show with the gap.  However, this isn't my area of expertise and it's possible it could be different with Ingram Sparks.  Hopefully someone with more knowledge in this are will be able to post.  You could try exporting to PDF with the gap and uploading that to the previewer and see if hows it looks.

[Catshill]

Exporting to pdf to see the result is the way. Your commercial printer will be able to flight check to confirm that everything including bleed is correct.

[thomaso]

On 4/12/2022 at 10:29 AM, McNelly said:

In their documentation, they mention that they include a 3mm no-ink gutter area where the pages are glued together. I believe Barnes and Nobles uses the same printer, and in their preview of the final print PDF, they have cropped 3mm off the fold-side of my images.

(…) or whether I should go and upload the spreads as they are - filling out the whole page with 0.125 inch bleed.

Although I have not yet used any of your printing services, I first wonder if you are confusing "bleed" with "page area without colour". While the former would preserve the page width (because bleed is trimmed as extra space / additional page width), trimming "3 mm on the fold side of my images" would reduce the final page width by 3 mm, resulting in a different media size and aspect ratio. The latter would indeed be neither useful nor an advantage in the production process. Could it be that your experience with B&N was due to an incorrect page width in the print data, e.g. because the bleed for the inside edge of the pages was not included in the print data? Or could it be perhaps 'just' an inaccuracy in their screen preview, in particular if it's in reduced size?

I doubt that the method shown in your 2nd screenshot would be correct and lead to the desired result, because it would mean a reduction of the page width if the two halves of the illustration in the spine fit together. So I'd recommend to double-check the printer's requests for the inner bleed to be able for a final decision.

EDIT: Maybe they request inner bleed but also demand to keep this area blank? That would mean for your layout a visual impression of your 1st screenshot but created by two separate image frames (one for each page), placed in the layout's centre touching each other, not showing a gap in the illustration and layout view. Then the gap would occur as white in the bleed of the exported PDF only.

Edited April 13, 2022 by thomaso