Name: InDesign Tutorial - Setting bleed and slug guides for printing
Uploaded: 2025-07-27T18:46:15.000Z
Duration: 3 min 19 s
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To-infinitive

For print documents that you'll be sending to be printed on a printing press, bleed is for when you want a background color or an image to extend all the way to the edge of a page.

Modal verbs - A2

And see, in order for that to work on a printing press, you actually have to extend it past the edge of the page onto the pasteboard.

If you don't, then when it ends up on press, you may see a white sliver down one side or the other.

So to compensate, printers want you to extend the object off the page onto the pasteboard.

And then they print the whole thing on a larger sheet of paper, and then they trim it down to where the edge should be.

But how far should you bleed off the page?

Well that's where the bleed guides are helpful.

Now you can add bleed guides in the New Document dialog box.

But if you forgot to or you need to change it later, then all you need to do is go to the File menu and choose Document Setup.

You may also need to open this bleed and slug area down here.

In this case, I'm going to change the first bleed setting to 9pt, that's 9 points, or an eighth of an inch, or about 3 millimeters.

Then I just press Tab, and InDesign makes all of them the same.

Because the Preview checkbox is turned on inside this dialog box, you can actually see the red line around the page.

Now, while I'm here, I'm also going to add a slug area, which is kind of like bleeds, but it lets you put information about your document on the pasteboard, stuff you may want to communicate to the printer, but you want them to trim off and throw away later.

Most documents don't need this, but this particular trifold does, so I'm going to add 36 points, or a half inch, here at the top.

And now I need to extend these objects out to the bleed guide, just a little bit so that it reaches the edge of the guide.

I'll move this one in the middle, just drag these corner handles out, and let's do this one as well.

You can go beyond the bleed guides if you want, but you need them to go at least to that bleed guide.

OK, now when you print or export your file as a PDF, you're going to need to turn on a checkbox that tells InDesign to include this bleed, but I'll cover that more later in this course when we discuss printing in PDF.

Well, if I scroll up just a little bit here, you'll see that I have some text frames out on my pasteboard.

And see that light blue guide around them?

So because the text is inside that guide, I have the option to include it when I print or make a PDF.

And again, that information is just for the printer, it'll get trimmed off later after the piece comes off press.

So bleed guides and slug guides, they seem obscure at first, but if you're trying to make a good press-ready document, you don't want to forget about them.