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 to have turned on 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 many of the 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 also might not need Page Numbers and Sheet labels in the slug.

Trim and Bleed Marks

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, when risograph printing.

Trim Marks

Trim marks show where to cut, to make the pages of your book have its final desired dimensions, called the Trim Size.

Bleed Marks

In addition to Trim Marks, you might also have marks next to them that specify the dimensions of the Bleed.

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 registering 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. You can also use center marks to register two or more ink colors together.

Center marks where 4 pages meet are marked by a +; and center marks for 2-up are marked by two dashes (- -) with the blank space in the middle of the dash as the exact center of the page.

Center marks can also be used for cutting apart the pages when printing more than 2-up; and usually they’ll be at the same place as the cuts in the display only [[Overlays]].

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 Trim Size that’s smaller than the max page size.

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. They are in the top left corner of the page, and say “Sheet 1: front” and “Sheet 1: back” and so on.

They are also most useful for manual printing, such as risograph:

1. to make sure you are printing the correct artwork on the back of the page (eg, making sure that you don’t print the back of page 3 onto the back of page 1 on accident)
2. to have the stack of paper aligned with the lead edge feeding into the machine in the correct direction (don’t put the paper in the feed tray reversed 180 degrees)

Settings

In the Printer’s marks section of Settings, you can specify which printer’s marks are selected by default when you begin making a layout.

Paid license users can also customize the length, line thickness, offset from the page boundary, gaps, for the various lines, as well as font sizes for the sheet labels and page numbers.