And no, I don mean text margins, I mean actual print bleed outside the page, similar to what’s possible in Draw.
Writer is hell-bent on not allowing anything outside the page borders, even though it can be very handy for bleed, for illustration cropping, logo positioning, or heck even to just temporarily move something out of the way. Things like MS Word and Adobe Indesign have no such limitation, nor does Draw… so why does Writer?
Or am I just missing an option or toggle somewhere?
I took a stab at a workaround for this:
1. Create your text layout in Writer, export as PDF, and open the PDF in Draw.
2. Set your page size and bleeds the way you want them (I couldn't find bleed settings in Draw so I created a custom page as 8.76 x 11.26—added 0.13" extra on each side—for a US Letter-size page with bleeds).
3. Import your background art with the bleeds and arrange it as the bottom-most item on the page.
4. Select the text area object and set the area fill to none and the border to none.
Note that Scribus will import your PDF as well and give you professional features like page bleeds—with crop marks (which you’d have to add by hand in my solution).
Bleeds are traditionally found in page layout applications—not word processors. I recommend trying VivaDesigner (paid from viva.de), PageStream (paid from pagestream.org), or Scribus (free from wiki.scribus.net/canvas/1.5.0_Release), which are page layout applications.