Text Bubbles too Close to the Trim Line

I moved another inch closer to the End today. I was double-checking the size of images — again — and, by accident, discovered that some text bubbles were running off the page, overflowing the trim line. Though I thought I had placed images and text boxes with mindful care, I really missed the mark. I’ve been looking at these pages for months without seeing that the text bubbles were too close to the page’s trim line…until I exported the book to a PDF and pored over each page pixel by pixel.

Here’s an example of what happens when I rely on the judgement of my eyeballs — on a single page there two text bubbles leaving the page and one in danger of becoming the third mistake if the trim line is shy by a millimeter or two. Three mistakes on a single page! Whoa!

Bleed Lines and Trim Lines for My Children's Picture Book

I spent the day learning the basics of setting up a print book. I’ve been avoiding thinking about this, but the time has come to face the music. Ingramspark provides a detailed File Creation Guide PDF that lays out the requirements for an acceptable submission. My pages are going to be 8-inches by 8-inches. The Guide explains that images that fill the page from border to border must extend more than .125 inches beyond the 8x8-inch square on all sides side. In other words, the image must overflow the page by .125 inches. In addition, the inner side of the page — the side that’s fastened to the binding — must have a .25in margin.

Here’s an example that shows the bleed lines for a full page image. Everything outside of the trim size will be removed. When exporting the book to PDF for actual publishing, I will turn off all of the guidelines and color samples.

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