Printing guide
The eight mistakes below cause the vast majority of avoidable print problems — from bleed-less cards rejected by the printer, to thousands of flyers with the URL cut off. Each one is easy to spot once you know what to look for. None of them costs anything to fix in advance.
Exporting a card or flyer at the trim size, so the printer has no extra image area to cut into. Cutting tolerance leaves a thin white edge.
Fix: Add 3 mm of bleed on every side (0.125 in for US sizes). Export at the bleed size, not the trim size.
Phone numbers, URLs or important words placed right against the edge of the design. Cutting tolerance chops the last letter or row of pixels.
Fix: Keep all critical content inside a 3 mm safe area from the trim line.
Pulling a 600 × 400 pixel photo from a web page and dropping it onto an A5 flyer. The result looks pixellated and unprofessional.
Fix: Source images so that the pixel count divided by the print size in inches gives at least 300. For an A5 image at 300 DPI, you need at least 1748 × 2480 pixels.
Designing in RGB and sending to an offset printer that needs CMYK. Vivid colours come back duller than the screen showed.
Fix: For offset print, design in CMYK from the start, or convert and proofread before sending. For digital print, RGB is usually acceptable but verify with the print shop.
Leaving "Fit to page" or "Scale to fit" enabled in the print dialog when printing templates, labels or rulers. The output is scaled by 2–5%, breaking alignment with pre-cut sheets and producing rulers that read wrong.
Fix: Set the print dialog to "Actual size" or "100%". Verify with a printed ruler before bulk runs.
Exporting a PDF without embedding the fonts you used. The printer's system substitutes a different font, and headings reflow with broken spacing or wrong shapes.
Fix: In the PDF export dialog, enable "Embed all fonts". For maximum safety, convert text to outlines — letters become vector shapes that never substitute.
Exporting an A4 PDF and sending it to a US printer who runs it on Letter (or vice versa). The output is silently scaled or has wrong margins.
Fix: Confirm the paper size with the printer before exporting. If you work across regions, maintain two versions (A4 and Letter) rather than one "averaged" file.
Forgetting to design the back of a card or flyer, or forgetting to tell the printer to print double-sided. The cards arrive blank on one side.
Fix: Include a second page in the PDF for the back, even if minimal. Explicitly state "double-sided" or "back side as supplied" on the order.
Before any bulk print run, do a single-sheet proof on plain paper. Check three things:
Three minutes here prevents most of the disasters that show up after you have paid for a thousand copies.
Forgetting bleed is the most common reason print orders get rejected before printing. The cost is usually only your time (the printer asks for a re-export), but for tight deadlines that delay can be expensive.
Receiving a thousand business cards with the URL or phone number cut off because text was placed too close to the trim line. Nothing can be salvaged — the only fix is to reprint.
It varies. Modern digital print presses convert RGB to CMYK on the fly with surprisingly good results. Offset presses are less forgiving, and very saturated RGB colours (especially bright greens, oranges and blues) shift visibly when converted. If colour fidelity matters, design in CMYK from the start.
Pre-cut label sheets rely on the printed content matching the die-cut positions exactly. Even a 2% scale change moves every label out of alignment with its die cut. "Fit to page" silently introduces this kind of scaling, and the result is a sheet of slightly-off labels — visually fine, mechanically wrong.
Print one proof on plain paper before any bulk run. Hold the proof against a real label sheet, business card or template and check alignment by hand. Verify the print dialog has "Actual size" selected. This three-minute check catches the vast majority of preventable mistakes.