Bleed (printing)
printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet before trimming
In printing, bleed is printing that goes beyond the edge of where the sheet will be trimmed. In other words, the bleed is the area to be trimmed off. The bleed is the part on the side of a document that gives the printer a small amount of space to account for natural movement of the paper during guillotining, and design inconsistencies. Artwork and background colors often extend into the bleed area. After trimming, the bleed ensures that no unprinted edges occur in the final trimmed document.
It is very difficult to print exactly to the edge of a sheet of paper; therefore, it is necessary to print a slightly larger area than is needed and then trim the paper down to the required finished size. Any content that is intended to extend to the edge of the paper must be extended beyond the trim line in order to produce bleed.
Bleeds in the imperial system generally are 1/8 of an inch from where the cut is to be made. Bleeds in the metric system generally are 2mm-5mm from where the cut is to be made, often varying by printing company. Some printers ask for specific sizes; most of these companies place the specific demands on their website or offer templates that are already set to their required bleed settings.
“Bleed (printing)” enters the record as printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet before trimming. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bleed, printing and goes can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q769508. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bleed (printing)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.