The last step before a real printer. Take a JPG, PNG or PDF and get back a press PDF at the exact trim size with proper bleed, crop marks and a real TrimBox and BleedBox, plus a proof sheet that shows you the cut line. Your file is never uploaded.
Your artwork is processed in this tab and is never sent anywhere. The two PDF libraries this page runs on are downloaded from a public CDN when the page opens, which is the only network traffic besides anonymous page and usage counts.
3 mm is the usual standard. Many US printers ask for one eighth of an inch, which is 3.18 mm.
Keep text and logos inside the safety margin. Cutting is never exact, so anything closer to the trim line can end up shaved.
A print shop rejects files for the same three reasons over and over. The page is the wrong size, there is no bleed, and there are no crop marks. This page fixes all three in one pass. It builds a PDF whose page is your trim size plus bleed on every edge, writes a real TrimBox and BleedBox into the page dictionary so the shop's RIP knows exactly where the cut is, and draws crop marks outside the bleed so a human can see it too.
Guillotines drift by a millimetre or two. If your background stops exactly at the cut line, some copies come back with a thin white sliver down one edge. Bleed is extra artwork that runs past the cut so there is something to cut into. Three millimetres is the usual ask.
If your artwork was designed at the finished size and has no bleed, this tool can invent it three ways. Mirror reflects the outer few millimetres of pixels outward, which is invisible on photos, gradients and textures. Scale up enlarges the whole design by the bleed ratio and lets it run off the edge, which keeps a hard edge or a photographed border looking right but shifts and slightly crops everything. Solid colour extends a flat background, and you can sample that colour straight from the artwork edge. Mirroring is a guess, not magic. If your design has a border, a frame or a logo near the edge, look at the proof before you send it.
Feed it a PDF and the page is embedded, not rasterised. Text stays as text, lines stay as lines, and the file a prepress operator opens is still sharp at any zoom. That matters because the invoice, proposal and resume generators on this site produce vector PDFs, and running one through a screenshot style tool would throw all of that away. The business card maker exports a 300 DPI PNG, which this page handles on the image path. Because vectors cannot be mirrored, PDF input gets the scale up or solid colour bleed instead.
Image input is different. There the page is a picture by definition, so the page is rendered at the resolution you choose, 300 DPI by default. On "Choose for me", photographic artwork is stored as JPEG so the file stays a sensible size, and small pages of flat art and line work are stored as PNG so edges stay crisp. A big page falls back to JPEG whatever it holds, because a full page PNG balloons the PDF. If you have flat colour or line art at a large size and you want the hard edges kept, pick PNG yourself in the format dropdown.
The proof is a PNG rendered from the finished PDF, not from the preview, so it shows what you are actually sending. The trim line is drawn in magenta, the safety margin in cyan and the bleed edge in grey. Look at it once before you upload to the printer. If a phone number is sitting on the cyan line, move it. One proof covers one page, the page you have selected in the preview, so on a multi page job select each page and download its proof.
The output is RGB. Browsers cannot do a proper CMYK separation or an ICC profile conversion, so this page does not pretend to. Most modern digital printers and web to print services accept RGB and convert on their end. If your shop asks for CMYK, PDF/X-1a or a specific ICC profile, this file still gets the size, bleed and boxes right, and the shop or a designer does the colour conversion as a last step. For the same reason there is no registration target or colour bar here. In an RGB file those marks are decoration, because a real registration mark has to be built from all four inks.
Password protected PDFs are refused. The library that keeps your vectors intact cannot read encrypted page content, and quietly producing a corrupted page would be worse than saying no. Open it in your browser's PDF viewer, print it back out to a fresh PDF, and bring that file here.
Very large pages drop resolution rather than fail. Browsers cap how big a canvas can be, and phone browsers cap it hard. A poster at 600 DPI can exceed that, so the page is built at the highest resolution that actually fits and you are told what was used. It will not hand you a blank page.
It will not upscale. If your artwork only carries 150 DPI at the size you asked for, the page is built at 150 DPI instead of interpolating up to 300 and pretending. The resolution warning tells you before you build, not after the print run.
Business cards in both the 85 by 55 mm European size and the 3.5 by 2 inch US size, A6 to A3, US Letter, Legal and Half Letter, 4 by 6 and 5 by 7 postcards, DL flyers, square formats, door hangers and a 24 by 18 inch yard sign. Anything else, type the numbers. Drop a PDF and the trim size is read straight off the page it came from.