Is there a way to build "bleed" into a file, for printing?

ThunderNixon

I'm making a book via DrawBot, and some of the pages will have a full bleed background color.

Is there any way to add a bleed into a document (aside from changing my whole layout calculation)?

I could imagine there being some kind of technique like this:

W, H = 400, 400
newPage(W,H)
bleed = 25
margin = 25

rect(0-bleed,0-bleed,W+bleed*2,H+bleed*2)

fill(1)
textBox("Content with margin", (margin, margin, W-margin*2, H-margin*2))

saveImage("/Users/stephennixon/Desktop/printready-page.pdf")

However, in a quick test, it doesn't seem like that "beyond the edges" content is carried by the PDF into the Adobe Acrobat print > marks and bleeds.

If there isn't an "easy way," is there a known way? Do I just add a quarter-inch to all pages (except for along the spine), and then just tell the printer to slice that off?

frederik

made an issue see: https://github.com/typemytype/drawbot/issues/287

MauriceMeilleur

Is there anything happening in PageBot that would be relevant? I confess to having been too caught up job-hunting and moving/settling to be caught up on where Petr and the other contributors are with the project …

andyclymer

Until there's a new feature for this, I think you could replace your newPage() calls to a custom newPageWithBleed() that goes something like this, and wouldn't need to change any of your other drawing code —

def newPageWithBleed(w, h, bleed):
    newPage(w + bleed * 2, h + bleed * 2)
    translate(bleed, bleed)

W, H = 400, 400
bleed = 25

newPage(W, H)
rect(0, 0, 20, 20)

newPageWithBleed(W, H, bleed)
rect(0, 0, 20, 20)