Generating clip path (bleed) on a single side

When you place artwork onto a packaging design, you need to define the areas that are vital for the placement of artwork. Once defined, these areas are then used for the generation of bleed.

Generating bleed on a single side

Generally, bleed is defined on a single side of a design. The procedure that follows walks you through the steps you need to do to define this bleed. You can also define bleed for both sides of a design.

To generate bleed on a single side of a design

NOTE: The procedure that follows is the automatic way of generating bleed. If for some reasons you want to generate bleed by hand, use the offset-drawing mode. The two modes produce identical results.

  1. On the Layout toolbar, click Generate Bleed by Levels of Importance .

A contextual edit bar appears above the graphical area. See details about what each button means and does. By default, you see the front side of the design.

By default, Prinect marks the areas of importance set by default. You can set how Prinect marks the default areas. See Step 5 later in this topic.

  1. Select the areas on which no artwork will be placed: click No Artwork , and then, in the design, consecutively click the areas that will be free of artwork.
  2. Select critical artwork areas: in the contextual edit bar click Important Area , and then, in the design, consecutively click the respective areas.
  3. Select less critical artwork areas: in the contextual edit bar click Unimportant Area , and then, in the design, consecutively click the respective areas.
  4. (Optional) If you want to mark the entire design as the same type of clipping area, click Set All Regions .

NOTE: When you click the Set All Regions button, the Set Default Clipping Level dialog box will appear, in which you can set a default clipping area that Prinect will use in future.

  1. After you have designated the important and unimportant areas, click Generate Bleed Generate Bleed.

The Bleed Generation Options dialog box appears.

Bleed Offset Enter values for the bleed distances for the important and unimportant areas. NOTE: Normally, the value for the important areas is greater than that for the unimportant areas, but you can make them identical if that suits your case.
Important areas Offset for the important areas
Unimportant areas Offset for the unimportant areas
Round With Choose whether to use arcs or lines for the angle roundings of the bleed: arcs or lines.
Angle threshold This field is available when you have chosen to use lines for rounding the bleed contour. Type the value for the angle at which you want the roundings to take effect.
  1. To generate the bleed, click OK.

An example of generated bleed on a design. In the Layers & Objects tabular view, notice the newly created entry for the bleed object. It indicates that the created bleed is applied to the front side.

This is the most common case of generating clip path (bleed), in which you create bleed on one of the sides of a design. See how you can generate bleed on both sides of the design.

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