Artboards and bleeds

[BillUX]

I've been using AD for a month. I've been making two page marketing sheets of various sizes.

 

For a document, I created two artboards for front and back so I can see both at once. I setup bleeds which you can't see onscreen before exporting.

 

My questions are:

1. When I export to PDF with bleeds showing, my front page has printer marks but no bleeds while the back page shows the printer marks and bleeds. I definitely have the content going outside the artboard on both pages, so why would the back show bleeds and the front doesn't?

 

2. Should I even use Artboards at all for a 2 page document? It seems like some things don't work right with Artboards. Is there a better way?

 

3. When is there going to be a way to see the bleeds onscreen? It's tiresome to export and check the export just to check a bleed.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

[Dazmondo77]

I find artboards is very hit and miss when bleed is needed, sometimes theres no bleed, sometimes there is, sometimes theres bleed on the background but not on any photographs that bleed off the page (see attached) the only solid way I've found is to set up each page as a single document which works great - hoping these bugs will be gone when we get viewable bleed guides

[MikeJ]

We have also had some issues with bleed. We have a lot of files created in Illustrator with 2 or more pages that we are opening in Affinity Designer.

 

Part of our workflow is to rasterize the background including any objects with transparencies, shadows and gradients.

 

Example of Issue:

After rasterizing with bleed on page 2 then exporting to a .pdf we found that the right side, top and bottom did not have bleed but the left side did.

When paying more attention to the bounding box we could see that the right side, top and bottom were cropped or cut off during the rasterization process.

 

We noticed that the document size is related to the total area of the artboards.

If you change the size of an artboard or add an artboard the document size changes as shown in the dimensions of the Document Setup dialog.

 

 

Here is our work around so that we can export from the working file without having to create a new 1 page document.

• Create new artboards both before {to the left) and after (to the right) of the 2 artboards in our existing document.
  • These new artboards have a greater height than the height of the existing artboards.  (It did not seem to matter the exact size as long as they extended above and below the current artboard size including bleed dimensions)
  • This increased the size of the document.
• Updated the bleed settings in the "Document Setup" Dialog. (This needed to be done after the new artboards were added even if we had done previously)
• Adjusted the size of our art to extend into the bleed areas (It would be helpful if you could actually see this area)
• Grouped and Rasterized the art
  • We verified the bounding box extended past the artboard.
• Exported a single artboard to .pdf with the "Include bleed" and "Include printers marks" selected.
• Review created .pdf to make sure bleeds were there.

This solved our issue. Hopefully Affinity will correct this in future updates.

[deividtavares]

Hey guys!
I noticed that bleed is not visible in creation, only when we export.
The ideal in this case is to create the page already in size with the bleed,
but the Serif could adjust this in the next update, making this bleed area
visible for better framing of the printed material.

See you later. 

(Sorry for English)