Generate bleed for irregular shapes (v11.0)

In pdfToolbox 10, you were able to create bleed for 'regular' pages by various methods like:

  • Adding mirrored images
  • Repeating the last color pixel at the edges inside Trimbox
  • Mirroring the page content

pdfToolbox 11 introduced a Fixup for generating bleed for irregular pages. Using the Fixup 'Generate bleed for irregular shapes', you can create a shape from the settings specified in the "Shape definition" setting.

A predefined Fixup is available in the "Prepress, Color and Transparency" library: "Generate 5mm bleed at dieline (Processing Steps)".

Here is how you can achieve this:

How to generate bleed for irregular shapes

  1. Type 'bleed' in the Search field
  2. Click on 'Generate bleed for irregular shapes' in the 'Type of Fixup' area and specify the settings to generate bleed.
  3. Repeat only: Here you can define what content do you want to repeat in order to generate bleed. In the screenshot above, the last pixel of the 'Visible page content' would be repeated.
    Usually you would e.g. not generate bleed for a die line.
  4. Except spot colors: Specified spot colors are excluded
  5. Colorspace: Various colorspace parameter are available in the drop down list like 'Use OutputIntent (CMYK will be used if no OI available)', 'CMYK and spot colors', 'Grayscale' etc 
  6. If you already have some bleed and only want to add to it you can create new bleed behind existing content
  7. Shape definition: Define the configuration of the shape around which you want to create the bleed. There are 3 "Create shape" settings in the drop down list:
    • "From tracing page content (including white areas)": If the white areas (as opposed to areas that just look white because they are actually transparent and let the white background shine through) are considered part of the rendered page content
    • "From tracing page content (excluding white areas)": If the white areas (as opposed to areas that just look white because they are actually transparent and let the white background shine through) are NOT considered part of the rendered page content
  8. Set bleedbox: You can either override the bleedbox on the existing one, set bleedbox if it is completely missing or ignore this setting

Testing the Fixup in Test mode

For our original test PDF as shown above and using the Test mode with the Fixup 'Generate bleed for irregular shapes', the resultant PDF looks like below:

You can watch all this and more about 'bleed' in the video below: