Bleed is the amount of artwork that falls outside of the printing bounding box, or outside the crop marks and trim marks. You can include bleed in your artwork as a margin of error—to ensure that the ink extends all the way to the edge of the page after the page is trimmed or to ensure that an image can be stripped into a keyline in a document.

The Marks & Bleed area of the Save Adobe PDF dialog box lets you specify the extent of the bleed and add a variety of printer’s marks to the file.

All Printer’s Marks

Enables all printer’s marks (Trim Marks, Registration Marks, Color Bars, and Page Information) in the PDF file.

Printer Mark Type

Lets you choose Roman printer’s marks, or Japanese marks for pages printed in Asian languages.

Trim Marks

Places a mark at each corner of the trim area to indicate the PDF trim box boundaries.

Trim Mark Weight

Determines the stroke weight of the trim marks.

Registration Marks

Places marks outside the crop area for aligning the different separations in a color document.

Offset

Determines the distance of all printer’s marks from the edge of the artboard. The trim marks are at the edge of the space determined by the offset.

Color Bars

Adds a small square of color for each spot or process color. Spot colors converted to process colors are represented using process colors. Your service provider uses these marks to adjust ink density on the printing press.

Page Information

Places page information outside the crop area of the page. Page information includes the filename, page number, current date and time, and color separation name.

Bleed Top, Bottom, Left, Right

Controls the bleeds for the artwork. When the button is selected, these four values are proportional—editing one will update the values in the other three.