Bleed cut off within bleed margin after exporting to PDF

[Jan Peeters]

Hi, I noticed a bug while exporting a cover in Publisher 2.0.3 to PDF.

At the top of the page the bleed is cut off within the bleed margins while the image extends outside of the page boundaries and fills the bleed margin within Publisher.
On all other sides this is correct but not on the top. See screenshots:

This is the doc in Publisher. Equal bleed (17mm) on all four sides:

I use the following export settings. As you can see the bleed is also here the same on all sides.

When you view the PDF though you can see that on the top, the bleed doesn't extend enough to fill 17mm of bleed. You can determine this to look at the distance of the image from the bleed marks.

As you can imagine I would love to see this fixed. Currently it is not possible to safely use Publisher 2.0.3 for hard cover book design where you need the big bleed to be able to fold the sheet around the card board.

I tried it with another document too, but see the same problem.

The art works are placed within an image frame.

Is this a knows issue? I couldn't find other reports on the forum.

Best and thanks, Jan

PS: I can share documents but only within private connection due to copyrights of the artist.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Jan Peeters
Typos

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, Jan Peeters said:

As you can imagine I would love to see this fixed. Currently it is not possible to safely use Publisher 2.0.3 for hard cover book design where you need the big bleed to be able to fold is around the card board.

The stuff in the Bleed area gets trimmed off, not folded.

[Jan Peeters]

Hi @Old Bruce You're misunderstanding my post, maybe because of my typo's.

When you print for hard cover books, the part of the cover that is within the bleed margins is folded around the cardboard to the inside of the book cover. After that the book binder sticks a inner cover sheet over it. If this bleed is cut off you'll risk seeing white on the inside.

But this has nothing to do with my bug report. I include a, hopefully, more clarifying screenshot.

The bleed in my exported PDF should be 17mm on all sides. On the top it isn't. I put a red box around it in Photoshop to make this more clear. As you can see at the top part of the bleed is missing while, if you look at the earlier post, in Publisher there is clearly content. 

[laurent32]

I think you're right, there is a problem with the way the pdf is built, there should not be that white space.

The solution might be to increase the top bleed, since you don't really use it for cutting but for folding… interesting way of doing… never had to print on card like that…

For specific reason you DO NEED to have ALL that "bleed"…

By the way, is that "white space" depending on the size of the top bleed you enter ? Say a pourcentage or a constant ?

[Jan Peeters]

11 minutes ago, laurent32 said:

I think you're right, there is a problem with the way the pdf is built, there should not be that white space.

The solution might be to increase the top bleed, since you don't really use it for cutting but for folding… interesting way of doing… never had to print on card like that…

For specific reason you DO NEED to have ALL that "bleed"…

By the way, is that "white space" depending on the size of the top bleed you enter ? Say a pourcentage or a constant ?

Thanks for your question @laurent32. I tried to make it with 10mm bleed on the top, the same problem occurs. I thought let's import it in Photoshop to see what that reveals. As you can see everything outside of the bleed area is transparant. But within the bleed area on the top even when I choose 10mm a white bar is visible which should have been filled with image content. 

I could make the bleed larger, and I might in case this doesn't get solved fast enough, but that would be a hacky solution and I like my software and output to be precise.

Hopefully the Publisher devs can reproduce this and fix it. Documents can be provided to Affinity reps at request.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Jan Peeters

[Old Bruce]

21 minutes ago, Jan Peeters said:

When you print for hard cover books, the part of the cover that is within the bleed margins is folded around the cardboard to the inside of the book cover. After that the book binder sticks a inner cover sheet over it. If this bleed is cut off you'll risk seeing white on the inside.

The stuff outside the trim marks is removed leaving you with a sheet of paper being the size of the Page, not the Page + the Bleed. Anything between the Page edges and the actual paper edges is waste.

[Jan Peeters]

Sorry @Old Bruce You don't seem to get the point of my bug report. 

In case you're interested in this video you can see how the bleed is used in hard cover book binding. Please don't post in this thread if it's not about solving my bug report. Thanks!

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Jan Peeters

[laurent32]

In general the bleed is some mm (3/4) but in your SPECIFIC CASE you need to have 100% of the bleed you asked for initially.

Especially on top, bottom and "exterior" : since you print for the front and the back cover !

Yes I'm sure some affinity team member will read your post, hopefully not too fast…

That white space is an ERROR, it shouldn't exist !!

Meanwhile I would give it a larger bleed for the top (the problem is only there) and (if possible, I don't know in fact if we can) put some manual printer marks ? <= to have the "real marks" still there…

But I agree it's a very temporary solution…

[Jan Peeters]

Just now, laurent32 said:

In general the bleed is some mm (3/4) but in your SPECIFIC CASE you need to have 100% of the bleed you asked for initially.

Yes correct, in most cases 3/4 mm is more than enough just not in this case. Thanks for confirming. I'll wait for a reply from Affinity!

[Old Bruce]

Baffling. It seems as though there is a strip of white on top of the artwork. Something is blocking the top edge. Are the little graphic elements pixel layers or copied and pasted? I am guessing that it is a pair of watermarks.

Here on Mac OS 11.7 I have no problem with 17mm bleed on simple tests. If you have a more complex structure there could be something that should extend past the 17mm on the top but doesn't.

What happens with a single Rectangle that is stretched out past the bleed and exported?

[laurent32]

What do u have on Master A ?

Could we have a screen shot of Master A ?

[Jan Peeters]

@laurent32 This is the master page, nothing on it:

@Old Bruce This are all the other items on the page when selected. Selection box doesn't extend beyond the boundaries of the selected items. I did this to check for stray items. As you can see on the earlier screenshots there is nothing covering the image at the top. 

The left part consists of text in News Gothic and pasted vectors from IIlustrator for the Sophie signature. (Publisher gave faulty exports when using a transparant png and psd version for the 'Sohpie' signature. Sort of weird digital noise on half of the image. Something else I have to report.)
The right part is a .eps logo. 

There are certainly no watermarks because all is self-photographed/scanned material.

The background artwork consists of two images that overlap slightly in the spine. The front image (right side of spread) runs from left side of spine to the right side of the cover and the back image runs from the left side of spine to the left side of the document. 

So then I tried to place a rectangle as per your suggestion:

Surprisingly it now exports the rectangle and background to the edge of the bleed area.
And the weirdest thing comes now… after removing the rectangle, even the background image got exported properly to the edge to the bleed area. I didn't change anything else in the document except placing and removing the rectangle. It's baffling. 

I have to try this with the other document I have but I have to go AFK now and will not be able to check other things until Monday. Thanks so far with thinking and troubleshooting with me. Really appreciated!

[Old Bruce]

21 minutes ago, Jan Peeters said:

Surprisingly it now exports the rectangle and background to the edge of the bleed area.

Arrghh. I hate when this sort of thing happens when troubleshooting. Now you / we have no idea what the original problem was (is).

[Jan Peeters]

Agreed, it’s very annoying. 

[laurent32]

Surely a very interesting case…

What about creating a completely new document from scratch with the same elements ?

Are you able to recreate the problem ?

By the way, did you keep a copy of the original (before testing with the green rectangle) ?

1 hour ago, Jan Peeters said:

And the weirdest thing comes now… after removing the rectangle, even the background image got exported properly to the edge to the bleed area. I didn't change anything else in the document except placing and removing the rectangle. It's baffling.

Something got updated…

[Jan Peeters]

I've discovered that it occurs when I activate 'Convert image colour space'.

When I leave it off all goes well

So if anyone has the time to test this with a different setup and copy my settings I would be grateful. maybe we can determine the cause after all.

Please make sure it has a large bleed and the image expands to the edges of the bleed. 

[Jan Peeters]

Well with a new export the bleed was again cut off and it didn't matter if I activated or deactivated the 'convert image color space'

I then converted my artwork images to jpg and then everything exported correctly.

I'm starting to become convinced that the export module has problems converting TIFFs and PNGs to PDF. Affinity please check this. There is also a complaint about garbled output in the forum. 

I'm going back to Indesign for now. Sorry to say. I'll be back when I can confidently export PDFs again. This is costing me too much time.

[stokerg]

Hi @Jan Peeters,

Can you you upload the afpub file to our Dropbox here and i can get this logged with the Developers  

[Jan Peeters]

Hi @stokerg, thanks for logging this with the devs. I have included all files and an URL to this thread. Curious for their conclusions. Thanks, Jan

[Jan Peeters]

@stokerg I'm very curious to know if the devs concluded the same problem as I did and if and when this will be solved. It's not been solved in the latest 2.1 beta's. I've noticed in further testing that it happens when you activate the "Convert image colour spaces" feature.

It's currently keeping me in Indesign since Affinity Publishers export is not reliable enough.