Scaling Content For Print - Panicking..

Question

hello all,
i have been trying to sort out my eBook for print. as a self-taught user and total novice to printing procedures and requirements, i have made a fatal error of putting a lot of my content ouside the inner purple margins of the pages. ie. they use all of the page..
here is a screenshot of a corner of one of the pages:
as you can see, the page numbers and text in the corner is at the extremeties of the page..
i have been told by the printing company that i will either need to scale all of the content to fit inside the purple borders, or alternatively add 3mm of bleed on to all of my documents. i do not know how to do either!
they said the recommended size would be 216mm x 154mm, but i am completely lost here and in a panic as my deadline is approaching.
any help anybody can give is appreciated..!!!!!
thank you in advance
best,
owen

Answer 1

The purple margin guides are just that, guides, and there is absolutley nothing sacred about them, nor is there any requirement that content remain inside them. You se them for your convenience and to control the size of automatically generated text frames, and in many, if not most, documents they would be well beyond 3 mm from the edge to allow for  content not to disappear into the binding and to give readers som sapce to hold the page.
What's important here is what you want and expect to happen in that corner. Your printer is telling you that they don't guarantee to trim exactly to the theoretical page edge (a common warning). Most digital print devices are not as accurate as a press at getting perfect page-to-page regisitration, so when a stack is cut some content will be closer and some further from any given edge as you move through the stack. Even pages printed on a press can have some variation, and if the cutter operator is sloppy or debris has built up, the cut may not be where it is supposed to be. There is also the problem of non-printing areas along the edges of a sheet that are used either to move the paper along or to prevent ink from getting past the edge and gumming up the equipment.
In this case it doesn't sound like the problem is a non-printing area, but rather trimming exactly on the corner. This means that there is a possibility that part of your corner text or page number may be sliced off, or the cut may drift the other way and leave more space than you wanted.
The page number is pretty easy. Move it away from the edge as far as is practical. The corner text is not so easy since it looks like you really want it right in the corner. Bleed will not solve this. Bleed is when you extend the "artwork" (which simply means any area receiving ink) beyond the trim edge of the page. 3 mm is a fairly standard amount. The purpose of bleed is to prevent a white line showing along an edge after trimming when the ink should extend all the edge. Anything beyond the point where the paper is cut is discarded.
So a 3 mm bleed will allow the for up to 3mm of misalignment in the cutter, but if the page is shifted 3mm in one direction, the opposite edge is also shifted 3mm in the same direction, so whatever amount is trimmed outside the designed page edge on one side is trimmed away inside the opposite edge. In order to be sure that you don't lose anything important you must hold all content you care about back from the edge at least as much as the bleed allowance, and more is probably a good idea. Similarly, if you expect a white border, it needs to be wide enough to withstand the misalignment.
In the case of your corner text, trimming off any part of it would be bad, so the only real solution is to alter the design so none of it is closeer than 3mm to the edge (and hold the page number at least 3mm from the edge, as well). If the units on the rulers ar in mm, it looks as if the margins are set to 3mm, so yes, you'd need to move text objects inside the guides. Images could be enlarged to extend off the page by 3mm if you like, or also moved inisde the guides.
One easy way to accomplish this (moving everything inward) would be to place your current pages in a new document of the correct size and scale them. You can do that using the script you'll find at InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » Zanelli Releases MultiPageImporter for Importing both PDF and INDD Files
Another option is to find a printer who understands that position of the corner content is critical and can print and trim to the tight tolerance required. That service is likely to cost more.