Draw: Page is same size as layout but appears bigger and exports to PDF behind layout

English
#1

I have a layout comprised of drawings, images and text boxes. When I select all the elements of my layout, Position and Size shows the size. I set the Page Properties to the exact same size.

I set the color of the page to grey. Now here’s the problem:

Even though the page is same size as the layout, it appears larger than the layout on the screen. Thin slices of the grey page appear on all sides of the rectangular layout.

When I select all and export selection to PDF, these grey slices get exported to the PDF.

When I select all and export to PNG, the grey slices are not in the PNG.

I don’t want to see the oversized Page in my exports, I only want to see the layout.

Is there a simple solution to this problem?

Also I kerned a few characters in one of the text boxes. When I export to PDF, the kerning is accurately exported.

But when I export to PNG, the kerning is not there, it looks like I didn’t kern at all.

Libre version 7.3.0.3. Sorry I don’t have a newer version, I will update it when I get a new computer soon.

Any help would be very appreciated.

#3

It might be a screen rendering issue, or maybe something similar to tdf#161558.
I think the page background colour is not relevant
Attached .odg and resulting .pdf. The PDF shows lines next to straight edges at 100%, but not at 300%
ExportSelectionToPDF121720.odg (15.2 KB)
ExportSelection121720.pdf (16.3 KB)

#4

Thanks for your suggestions. I’ve spent so much time trying to make these borders disappear. The best I have been able to do is make the page transparent. Then, when I print, the borders are still there but they show as white, not grey.

I’ve tried all the suggestions from Google AI and none of them work, Google AI refers to features that I don’t have in my menus, even though it’s supposed to be giving me answers for my version of the program.

I plan to have this PDF printed by an offset commercial printer. Is the printer able to crop off the borders easily?

A bigger problem is that I think these borders are screwing up my page measurements. I need an exact size in centimeters and I think the Draw program is including the unwanted page borders in its calculations.

When I try to make the Page the exact same size as the Layout, it doesn’t fit. Some elements of the layout display as outside the page.

I don’t have these problems when I export the layout as PNG, but the PNG doesn’t have the same quality in the text areas of the layout.

Should I use an online program that says it can trim the borders from PDF files? But I don’t want to lose quality when the cropped PDF is encoded again. Any recommendations on a service that can do this?

I’ve also tried exporting to SVG but that has issues too. Inkscape fails to convert it to PDF correctly and not all elements are rendered accurately.

Thanks again for any suggestions.

#5

There is an extension to simulate crop marks, https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/crop-mark but for commercial printing you should investigate using a different program such as Scribus which can do colour management, crop marks, etc.

So you will need to crop as the A series is based on a ratio of height to width based on the square root of 2

#6

Yes, I tried exporting it to PDF in Scribus but the result still had the white frame around it.

Maybe I can try another program that supports ODG files?

Is this normal behavior when exporting PDFs? Do they always have a frame around them? Do other programs do this when you export PDFs?

But I must emphasize that the size of the border looks exactly like the page behind the layout. When I enlarge the page, the exported PDF border gets bigger, when I shrink the page, it gets smaller, in exact correspondence to the amount the page size varies. Surely there must be a way to export a PDF that bleeds to the edges without any border?

Is it possible to make the layout not have any page behind it? The page always needs to be bigger than the layout because if it’s smaller, part of the layout without a page behind it is cut off when you export.

“So you will need to crop as the A series is based on a ratio of height to width based on the square root of 2”
Sorry, I don’t understand this at all. What is the A series? And when you say I will need to crop, do you mean physically crop the printout? Or crop with software?

As always, thanks for the assistance.

#7

Also, when I choose “Export Selection” it still has this border. Shouldn’t it just export the selection? The page behind the layout is not part of the selection.

And all page margins are set to zero.

#8

The bleed area needs to extend beyond your finished page area. The printer cannot print to the edge of the page so will print on larger paper and crop to size. The bleed area is coloured with the background so you don’t get a white line of the crop isn’t perfectly exactly aligned. The crop marks are there for the printer to physically crop the page to its finished size.

You will have this commercially printed so I don’t see the problem in extending the background to allow for a 5 mm bleed.

A4 paper is exactly double the size of A5 paper and half the size of A3 paper. Commercial printers might use B4 paper and crop the finished page to A4, but what the printer uses isn’t your problem

#9

“The bleed area needs to extend beyond your finished page area”

Thanks for that, Earnest. i am an amateur, never tried to do this before, so I have to learn. If the bleed must extend beyond the finished page area, I assume by Page you mean my layout, not Libre’s page that is behind the layout. Because this ODG file has to be exported to PDF for the printer, and when it’s exported to PDF anything beyond Libre’s page border is cut off.

So I assume you mean to just make my layout a little bigger, still within the boundaries of Libre’s page. And to make a bleed of my background, which is an outer space background, I would have to clone a few millimeters of the edges of outer space and append them to the existing outer space background. Is that correct?

I’m not sure if Libre can do that. I might have to do it in Gimp or Paint.net.

So if I just used one of these free internet services to eliminate the white border, it’s not enough? Because I need to extend the border so the printer can cut through the extended area without any white showing?

Is that correct?

But Libre can’t make crop marks, so maybe I have to export to PDF in Scribus. Are crop marks absolutely necessary or can the printer just figure out where to cut?

If it makes a difference, this will be printed on card stock, not paper.

Thanks again for the help.

#10

Forget about the GIMP or Paint.net, you need a DTP like Scribus or inDesign.

This question in Scribus forum might help, although not as much the Scribus manual, How to use bleed (crop marks) correctly?.
You could also search on crop and bleed

#11

Thanks. But before I can add crop marks I need to make my backgrounds wider. The only way I can see doing that without distorting the whole image is to add 5mm to the outer space background on each side that will be cut. The only way I can think of to do that is to select 5mm of the outer space edges, copy them, and then append them to the image to make it wider. Wouldn’t Gimp or Paint.Net be the correct program to do that?

Or do you know an easier way?

Thanks again.

#12

If you have an edge-to-edge photograph then you will need to expand it to cover the bleed area.

If it is a book then only the outer edges need bleed because the inner edge will be printed with the opposing page.

#13

It’s a card that will be folded in half. I realize that the inner edges don’t need to be expanded because they won’t be cut. It’s the outer edges that I have to extend 5mm. So I will copy 5mm slices from the outer space background and append them to the edges.

For some reason I’m having problems doing this in both Gimp and Paint.Net. Do you know an easier way to do it? Can it be done in Libre Draw?

So my plan is to expand the edges, replace the old background in the Draw layout with the bigger one, and save the file in Draw. Then open it in Scribus and see if I can add crop marks. Is that a good plan?

Thanks again.

#14
  • Increase the page size in Draw by 10 mm each direction.
  • Group everything on the page into a single group
  • Centre the group on the page
  • For photos, you might need to go back to the original photo and crop it larger so that it can be cropped in Scribus. Our you might be able to just expand it a bit
  • Export the new pages to pdf and add crop in Scribus
#15

Thanks again, EarnestAI. By the way, does that username mean that you are AI, not a person?

I expanded the background unevenly on 3 sides. So there’s more space on some edges than on others. Placing crop marks is another learning exercise that I’d rather avoid. You see, I don’t know exactly where I want to crop the layout. There is variability in where to decide to crop. Making the finished crop bigger might have implications in the price that I have to pay to the printer. I don’t know if making it a few millimeters bigger will affect the cost, but it might.

I wonder if I can just ask the printer to use his judgment on where to crop, or crop a few samples so that I can see the result and decide which one I like.

Another BIG problem is I will have to explain all this to the printer who most probably does not understand English, as I’m in a foreign country where very few people can speak English well. So I will have to use the translate app on my phone. Which often results in wrong translations.

Thanks again for your help.

#16

Draw is harder to use for DTP than Writer. I would be inclined to rebuild the project in Scribus with proper bleed and crop but regardless of how you plan to proceed, read through the tutorials and documentation for Scribus on preparing for print. It wouldn’t hurt to also read more general information on preparing to for print, there is plenty on the internet.

I have been where you are now; I had finished a couple of documents and exported to pdf but then I was asked to add a number of full page, edge-to-edge photographs. Fortunately, the original was in Writer so it was just a matter of increasing page size and increasing the margins to keep the text area the same, then adding extra pages with photos. I then imported the new pdfs into inDesign (a DTP program) and added crop marks.

The photos were in black and white so CMYK wasn’t really a problem. If you have colour photos then you will want to convert to CMYK; you could use the GIMP to do that but you might need to add an extension for colour management, or it might support it out of the box now. Scribus supports colour management so you can have more confidence in your converted photos being printed correctly.

#17

Thanks Earnest. My project is a lot simpler than yours was. I have been working on it so long that I don’t want to spend more time learning a new program like Scribus. I think the next step is for me to just go to the printer and see what he says, then make changes if necessary. I don’t know if the RGB colors in my file will translate to CMYK correctly. I will ask the printer.

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.