Printer’s Marks

These marks print directly on the page, to help you with the process of printing and assembling the books. Most of them end up getting cut off in the end of the process, and aren’t shown to the readers. For all the printer’s marks, you can turn them off if they’re not useful. In the settings, you can pick which ones you want checked by default.

Besides Trim Marks a lot of these are mostly useful for people doing risograph printing and other more manual printmaking methods. If you’re using printer that duplexes (prints front and back) automatically (like most modern inkjets, laserjets, and xerox machines), a lot of these printer’s marks might not be as useful. You likely won’t need Center marks, since the alignment on those printers is generally accurate enough. (And adjusting it isn’t particularly easy, though it is possible.) And if your printer collates automatically, you likely also don’t need Page Numbers and Sheet labels in the slug.

Trim Marks

(Coming in a future version.) Trim marks show you where to cut down your books to size. They can include cutting on three sides (for Booklet formats). Or you might cut on all four sides for Perfect Bound formats. Sometimes trim marks are also used as registration marks to manually align layers.

Center marks

Center marks show where the middle of the sheet is. This is helpful for alignment when you’re risograph printing or using another method where you’re manually placing the print onto the paper. You can fold the sheet in half twice to double check that the center of the print is landing in the center of the page. If it’s not, you can adjust the registration until you get the correct alignment.

Page Numbers

Small page numbers that print on the bottom of each page, in the “slug” to help with collating and assembly. These are intended to be trimmed off before the book/zine is distributed; so you need a Page Size that’s smaller than the max page size. You can use trim marks to help you cut in the right place.

These are different from the display-only overlays version of page numbers, which are big and bright and meant to help you see which pages are where.

Sheet labels

Like page numbers, these print in the “slug” to help with printing, collating and assembly, and are then trimmed off and not included in the final book.