From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Setting bleed and slug guides - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Setting bleed and slug guides

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- [Instructor] We've talked a lot about different kinds of guides that you can add to your document, but there are two more that are really important for print production. Bleed and slug guides. Now, if you're making an onscreen document, like it's only going to be displayed on screen, or maybe it's going to be printed on a desktop printer, then you can ignore the bleed and slug settings. But for print documents that you'll be sending to be printed on a printing press, well, these can be really important. Bleed is for when you want a background color or an image to extend all the way to the edge of the page, like it is here in this document. 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. This is called a bleed. 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 bleed guides are helpful. You can add bleed guides in the New Document dialog box. But if you forgot to, then you can just go up to the File menu and choose Document Setup. Here inside the Document Setup dialog box, there's a section called Bleed and Slug. To see it, you may have to click this little triangle. Let's move this up so I can see it better. For my Bleed setting, I'll just type 9 points, and then I'll press tab to make all the fields the same. 9 points is an eighth of an inch, or about three millimeters. Because the preview checkbox is turned on, you can see the bleed guides out here. That's the red line out on the pasteboard. 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 want to communicate to the printer, but you want them to trim off and throw away. Now, most documents don't have this, but this particular tri-fold does, so I'm going to add 36 points up here to the top. Great, now I click OK, but there's one more thing I need to do. I need to extend these objects, just resize them, so they reach the bleed guide. I'll simply drag these corner or side handles out. Let's do the one in the middle. You can make it go beyond the bleed guide if you want, but it needs to reach at least to that bleed guide. Okay, so 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 that bleed. But I'll cover that more later on in this course when we discuss printing and exporting PDFs. Oh, but what about that slug guide? Well, if I scroll up just a little bit here, you can see that I have some text frames out here on the pasteboard. And see this little light blue line around them? That's the slug guide that I created. So because the text frames are 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's going to get trimmed off later, after this 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 them.

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