A print-ready file has five things right: 3mm of bleed on every edge, all text at least 5mm inside the trim line, images at 300dpi at final printed size, colours converted to CMYK, and everything exported as a PDF with fonts embedded. Get those five right and your job goes straight to press. Get one wrong and you'll either hear from us before we print, or worse, see it in the finished product.
Here's what each of those actually means, why it matters, and the mistakes we see most often.
How much bleed do I need?
3mm on all four sides is the Australian standard. Bleed is artwork that extends past the final trimmed size, so an A4 flyer (210 x 297mm) should be supplied as a 216 x 303mm PDF, with your background colour or imagery running all the way to the outer edge.
Bleed exists because of physics. Commercial guillotines cut through stacks of hundreds of sheets at once, and the blade lands within a tolerance of roughly 1mm of the trim line. Without bleed, a cut that lands a fraction outside your artwork leaves a hairline white sliver along the edge - the single most common flaw in self-supplied files.
Quick reference for common products, supplied size including 3mm bleed:
| Product | Finished size | Supply your file at |
|---|---|---|
| Business card | 90 x 55mm | 96 x 61mm |
| DL flyer | 99 x 210mm | 105 x 216mm |
| A5 flyer | 148 x 210mm | 154 x 216mm |
| A4 flyer / letterhead | 210 x 297mm | 216 x 303mm |
| A3 poster | 297 x 420mm | 303 x 426mm |
(Note: Australian business cards are 90 x 55mm - not the US 89 x 51mm. A card built to US dimensions will sit subtly wrong in every Australian cardholder.)
What is the safe zone?
Keep all text, logos and anything you can't afford to lose at least 5mm inside the trim line. The same 1mm cutting tolerance that makes bleed necessary also means the trim can land fractionally inside your intended edge. Text sitting 1mm from the trim looks deliberate on screen and amputated on paper.
Combined with bleed, that gives you an 8mm band measured from the outer edge of your supplied file where nothing important should sit. On small items like business cards, 4mm is workable if the design demands it - but 5mm is safer, and a design that needs text closer to the edge than that usually needs a rethink rather than an exception.
What resolution do print files need?
300dpi at final printed size. Both halves of that sentence matter. An image that is 300dpi at 100mm wide becomes 150dpi the moment you scale it to 200mm, and 150dpi is visibly soft in anything held at arm's length.
Two practical consequences:
- Logos should always be vector (AI, EPS, SVG, or vector elements in a PDF). Vector artwork has no resolution - it's mathematics, not pixels - and scales from a business card to a banner without loss.
- Images pulled from websites are almost never usable. Web images are typically 72-150dpi at small physical sizes. If it looks fine on your website, that tells you nothing about whether it will print.
Large format is the exception: posters viewed from a metre or more only need 150dpi at final size, and a banner across the road can be far lower still. Viewing distance is what sets the requirement, not the paper size.
Why does my print look different to my screen?
Screens emit light in RGB; presses lay down ink in CMYK, and the CMYK gamut cannot reproduce the full RGB range. Bright blues, vivid oranges and fluorescent greens shift the most - that electric blue in your design brief is often the first casualty.
Converting your file to CMYK before you supply it means you see the shift on your own screen and can adjust, rather than discovering it in the finished job. If your design lives or dies on one specific colour, tell us - a press proof before the full run is cheap insurance. And supply brand colours as CMYK values rather than RGB or hex wherever you can.
What's the difference between rich black and 100% K?
100% K (black ink only) is correct for body text and fine detail. Rich black layers cyan, magenta and yellow underneath the black - a common recipe is C40 M30 Y30 K100 - and produces a noticeably deeper, denser black on large solid areas.
The rule: rich black for big areas, 100% K for small text. Rich black on small text is a classic error, because any slight misregistration between the four printing plates shows up as coloured fringing around every letter.
One trap worth knowing: never use "registration black" (100% of all four inks) for artwork. It exists so printers' trim marks appear on every plate - it's not a colour. At 400% total ink it oversaturates the sheet and can cause drying and set-off problems.
Should I outline my fonts or embed them?
Either works; embedding is usually better. Exporting a press-ready PDF with fonts embedded preserves the text as text - editable if something needs a last-minute fix, and cleanly searchable. Outlining converts every character to vector shapes, which guarantees the appearance on any system but makes the file permanently uneditable, so keep a live copy if you outline.
What doesn't work: supplying a file that uses fonts we don't have, without embedding or outlining. The file will either fail preflight or silently substitute a different typeface - and silent substitution is how a heading in the wrong font gets printed 5,000 times.
What file format should I supply?
PDF - specifically PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4. These aren't just export settings; they're print exchange standards that enforce embedded fonts and defined colour, which eliminates the two most common file failures before they happen. Every professional design tool (InDesign, Illustrator, Affinity, even Canva's print export) can produce one.
We also accept AI, INDD and EPS files. Avoid Word, Publisher, PowerPoint and standalone JPEGs where you can - office formats don't hold colour accuracy, rarely carry bleed, and reflow their layout depending on which computer opens them.
What's the minimum line weight that will print?
0.25pt (about 0.09mm) for a solid line in a single colour. Anything thinner - especially "hairline" rules set to 0pt - may look crisp on screen and drop out entirely on the press, or print on some sheets and not others.
Reversed-out lines (white lines on a printed background) need roughly double: 0.5pt minimum, because they're formed by the ink around them and fill in easily. The same logic applies to small reversed-out text, which is why tiny white text on a rich black background is one of the hardest things to print well.
The trap almost nobody checks: overprint
White text or objects accidentally set to overprint will vanish in the finished job. Overprint tells the press to print an element on top of the inks beneath instead of knocking them out - and since white in CMYK is the absence of ink, a white element set to overprint prints as nothing at all. It displays normally in most design software, which is what makes it dangerous.
If you've ever heard a horror story about text disappearing from a printed job that looked perfect on screen, this was probably the cause. View your PDF with overprint preview switched on (Acrobat: Preferences → Page Display → Overprint Preview) before you supply it.
The pre-supply checklist
Thirty seconds before you hit send:
- Document size = finished size plus 6mm in each dimension (3mm bleed per side)
- Background artwork extends to the bleed edge - no white borders unless intended
- All text and logos 5mm or more inside the trim
- Images 300dpi at the size they're used; logos vector
- Colours CMYK; brand-critical colours specified as CMYK values
- Body text 100% K; large black areas rich black
- Fonts embedded (or outlined, with a live copy kept)
- Exported as PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4
- Overprint preview checked - nothing vanishes
- Proofread. Then proofread again. We check files for technical problems before every job goes to press, but "Marketing Manger" in 60pt type is yours to catch.
Not sure? Send it anyway
Every file that comes through Tako gets checked before it goes to press, and if something's going to cause a problem, we'll flag it and tell you exactly how to fix it - or fix it for you. If file setup isn't your thing at all, our design team prepares print-ready artwork every day. Email your file to hello@takoprint.com.au and we'll tell you where it stands.