Print-ready PDF export
A print shop wants five things: the real page size, bleed on every edge, trim marks outside the bleed, fonts embedded, and enough resolution where the artwork is a picture. BoboCreate's PDF export is those five things as tick boxes.
What the panel does
| Vector, with embedded fonts | Text and shapes stay as instructions rather than pixels, so they are sharp at any size, and the fonts travel inside the file — the shop does not need them installed. |
|---|---|
| Include bleed | Extends the page past the trim by the design's bleed, 0.125 in on every print preset. |
| Show trim marks | Hairlines at the corners showing where to cut, in a margin of their own outside the bleed. |
| Include background colour | Off leaves the page colour to the paper, and elements set to cut out in download do so. |
| Page size | The design's own size, or a sheet of Letter, Legal, Ledger or A4 to print it on. |
The page size is the real size
A 5 × 7 in card exports as a 5 × 7 in page, not as whatever its canvas happens to be in pixels. That sounds obvious and is the thing most often wrong in a file a shop sends back: a PDF whose page is 1500 × 2100 points prints at 20 × 29 in, because a point is not a pixel.
A design with no physical size — something made for a screen — has no real size to use, so its pages come out at its pixels at 96 to the inch. The panel says so when that is what is happening.
What stays a picture
Vector covers text and shapes. Photographs and imported images are pictures and have a resolution, so they are the part of a design where 300 DPI still matters. A PDF can be perfectly sharp everywhere except the photograph somebody dropped into it.