Bleed question

I’m using illustrator 10 & i’m getting a little frustrated trying to work out how to make my bleeds smaller for print.

eg. Doing a flyer with letter placed in&out of print area. now say the letter “a” is hanging more than 5mm out of bleed area. Is there a way to actually cut it off without putting a layer over the top!. Its a little difficult to explain but basically i want to break it apart (can do) then select the area i need and be done with the rest of the letter. u know what i mean?..

i aint no tripper…

so what you’re saying is that you have a letter that should only be partially visible in the final thing (i.e it’s cropped)?

if this is the case, you will need to first convert the letter to paths, and then cut it up. I’m not familiar with the terms in Illustrator, but there should be some command about converting to paths or something, which will turn it into a normal vector object. From there, you could use the knife tool (is there one in Illy?) or just manually edit the points, to make it fit properly :smiley:

hope this helps

Stuart

well i’m still assuming that what i said before is what you want, but all this talk of bleeding worries me slightly, as i’m clueless about printing apart from the good old home inkjet

i did a quick example of what i was talking about. THe letter A in the pic has been modified to fit the page border and i left it in edit mode so you could see all those little point thingys

Stuart

did you find it? the crop tool…

cous if you didn’t … it is in the pathfinder palette…

the first button on the bottomright…

draw a white rectangle over the area you want to crop… hit the button to crop…
then ungroup it and delete the part you don’t need.

the pathfinder is full of cool stuff from cropping to combining. really need to check it out.

also make sure your bleed is at least 3mm all the time.

gl