Printing A Book How Much Gutter To Leave

A gutter is the section of the page that leads into the binding of perfect bound books and hard cover books.

Printing a book how much gutter to leave.

This process will cause a curve of the pages coming from the spine when the book is open. Most professional printers such as lightning source xlibris and self publishing inc provide designers with a template that shows the gutter size appropriate for the printing machinery. Gutter allowance is important for color hardcover and color softcover perfect bound books. A gutter margin setting adds extra space to inside margin of each page so to the left margin on the fronts of pages usually the odd numbered pages and the right margin on the backs of pages usually the even.

On books intended for offset it depends on the number of pages longer books need more gutter margins and kind of binding perfect binding creates tighter spines than notch or smythe sewn bindings. Consequently i always make the gutter margins on books intended for print on demand larger to make sure the type doesn t disappear into the gutter making it difficult to read. Hand sewing most casebound books are sewn by machine but books with lower pagecounts usually under 60 pages will be carefully sewn by hand. While the gutter and binding of hand assembled books is more visible every case bound book we produce always meets our high printninja quality standards.

On average the margins for a book are between 13 to 18mm depending on the type of book the genre the book is in and the number of printed pages. This is where the pages are glued together and into the book cover. For color books the area between the gutter line and the gutter allowance line should be free of any art graphics or text. Keeping this area free from print ensures the glue holds firmly.

But in addition to that margin you also want a gutter. Leave unticked primary text frame leave unticked page size this is easy to work out the height number is the height of your zine. So yes you have a half inch margin on the left and the right to have white space to keep your book easy to read. The width is the width of the back cover the spine size through the centre the width of the front cover.

These two products have binding types that are clamped and held together with glue. You want to make sure you have a nice space around the content but not too much so you have overly large blank areas. Safe area designated by a book printer the area that is far enough away from the trim or gutter edges to be considered safe within the tolerances of the printer s manufacturing equipment. So for an a4 book with a 5mm spine the height will be 297mm and the width 210 5 210 425mm.

If you re printing a double sided document that will go into a binder to form a book you ll want to adjust the gutter margin instead of adjusting the left or right margins.