print specifications

Print specifications

Folio pages

• Sheet: A3, 297 x 420 mm, portrait, printed one side only.
• Format: PDF with vector type and drawings; raster plates at 300 dpi. The browser export is RGB. If the print shop needs CMYK, convert with its supplied press profile after approving the RGB proof.
• No bleed and no printer margins. The page box is the sheet.
• Binding margin: 25 mm on the left, held by the masthead and the page grid.
• Type: nothing below 12 pt on a folio page (NESA rule). Body runs at 12.5 pt.
• Backgrounds and hairlines are the artwork. Print with background graphics on. The preview shell and the PDF route both set print-color-adjust: exact.
• Never print the folio from an A4 proof. At A4 the 12.5 pt body scales to about 8.8 pt and breaks the type rule on every page.

Printing the folio

Any printer that takes A3 will do: a school colour laser, a home A3 inkjet, or a print and copy shop.

• Paper: a heavy matte or satin stock, around 150 to 200 gsm, holds the solid fills without curling and stands up to handling in a binder. Plain 80 gsm copy paper shows through and cockles under heavy ink.
• Send the PDF, not the HTML, and ask for actual size. "Fit to page" or "shrink to fit" scales every page and breaks the type rule.
• Print one page first. Check a known measurement with a ruler, and check the colour fills and the hairlines, before printing all twelve.
• Expect colour to shift a little between printers, and between screen and paper. Judge the colour on the printed proof, not on the screen.
• Laser toner sits on the surface and can crack on a fold, so keep the pages flat. Inkjet needs a few minutes to dry before the pages are stacked.

Production items

Item	Sheet	Trim	Notes
Binder spine insert	A2, 420 x 594 mm	59 x 436 mm	The strip is longer than A3, so it prints on A2, two up with a spare.
Swing tag	A4	70 x 120 mm	Front and back on one sheet. Chamfered corner and punch hole are cut by hand.
Product labels	A4 x 4	71 x 48 mm patch	Each cell is the finished patch with the 55 x 36 mm ruled box inset. Sheet 1 as it reads, for printable fabric sheets and a label printer. Sheet 2 mirrored, for iron-on transfer paper. Sheets 3 and 4 are the reading proof and the notes, plain paper only.
Mount scaffold	A4 x 3	38 x 22 mm reference-offcut slots	Print at 100 % with margins set to none. Check the 100 mm calibration bar with a ruler before cutting.

Proofing

The print proof comes from scripts/preview.ps1, not from Canva. Open the built page, Ctrl+P, scale 100 %, margins none, background graphics on. The @page rule in each preview names the sheet size so the browser does not paginate against Letter or A4.

python scripts/print_pdfs.py makes the same print without the dialog. It builds the previews, prints each one with headless Chrome to build/print/, and fails if a PDF has a different page count from its preview or a page more than 1 mm off the sheet size. The Print workflow (.github/workflows/print.yml) runs it on every push to main that touches the design system and keeps the PDFs as a run artifact. The folio PDF is about 100 MB, because the plates are embedded at full resolution.