Book Printing Gutter

For most books an additional 0 2 or 0 3 inches on the inside edge of the page is plenty to create a gutter.

Book printing gutter.

The book fold layout sets you up for printing your masterpiece automatically in the correct order ready for folding and binding. The gutter is the space between each copy of your postcard on the press sheet. By default the gutter margin will be set to 0. Just what is a gutter margin and how do you set it for your book so that it can be properly published.

For more information on bleed see our print options help page. Gutters are setup during the prepress phase of the printing process and something your printer will handle once your design files are handed off. For example if you are printing a postcard multiple copies of the postcard will fit on a single press sheet. Whether you want to create a booklet for an event or print out an ambitious book project consider using the pre built page settings for booklets that comes with word.

On books intended for offset it depends on the number of pages longer books need more gutter margins and kind of binding perfect binding creates tighter spines. This could cause issues further on as the gutter margin is the amount of space between the content of your book and the fold where the pages of the book will be bound together. And all kinds of page layout software even ms word can automatically add a gutter to your specifications with ease. Here is what you need to know about gutter margins.

Setting a gutter margin. Let s say you have a print book that is 5 25 wide by 8 tall. First let s look at the basics. But for a book with full page images and most importantly two page spreads the gutter requires a bit of added attention.

These two products have binding types that are clamped and held together with glue. For book interiors intended to be printed only in black all graphics should be grayscale. Every page has three outside margins top bottom and side and one inside margin also called the gutter. Gutter margin margins are the blank spaces around the type area on a book page but the inside margin has the special name gutter and it is always the margin on the bound edge of the book page.

That said go ahead and give the gutter a 1 margin so the content of your book doesn t get lost in the fold. A gutter is the section of the page that leads into the binding of perfect bound books and hard cover books.