Print artboards

A canvas artboard can be a print piece — a flyer, poster, business card, or brochure — with real paper dimensions, bleed, and export options a print shop expects. It rides the same canvas-first loop as every other artboard: describe it to the Assistant, iterate, export.

What you get

• Paper presets — ISO A-series (A0–A6), US Letter/Legal/Tabloid, DL/C5 envelopes, EU/US business cards, and two common poster sizes.
• The artboard IS the bleed box — its resolved size is trim + 2×bleed, so a full-bleed background painted to the artboard's own bounds correctly reaches the cut edge. Pick a paper size in the Inspector and the artboard resizes to match; changing paper, orientation, or bleed re-resolves it.
• On-canvas guides — toggle View → Show print guides to see the bleed zone (red tint), trim line (solid), and safe margin (magenta, dashed) while you iterate — the pro-tool color convention (Adobe/Affinity).
• 300/600 DPI raster export — the PNG export dialog's Resolution picker includes physical DPI presets (96/150/300/600) alongside the usual 1×/2×/3× multiplier.
• Print-ready PDF — correct MediaBox ⊇ BleedBox ⊇ TrimBox nesting, with optional vector crop + registration marks. The PDF stays fully vector (Chromium's own print pipeline draws it — selectable text, embedded fonts); the bleed/marks/box work is a pdf-lib pass over that same vector page, never a re-render.

Author one

Ask the Assistant for a print piece — e.g. "A5 flyer for a weekend market, warm palette, 3mm bleed" — or scaffold it directly:

/design:new "Market Flyer" "A5 flyer for a Saturday farmers market"

Mentioning a print cue (flyer/poster/business card/brochure, a paper size, or print/tisk/leták/plakát/vizitka/brožura) sets the artboard's kind="print" and its print prop (paper, orientation, bleed). When iterating with /design:edit, keep critical content — headlines, logos, CTAs — inside the safe margin; anything meant to bleed off the page should extend to the artboard's own edge, not just the trim-inset area.

Export

# 300 DPI PNG — print-ready raster
/design:export png --scope artboard --option dpi=300

# Print-ready PDF — bleed included, crop + registration marks
/design:export pdf --scope artboard --option includeBleed=true --option marks=crop,registration

# Large-format PDF (e.g. a billboard authored at 1:10 scale) — 300 dpi
# capture for any dropped photo/art on the artboard; the page stays vector
/design:export pdf --scope artboard --option dpi=300

The same options are available from the ⌘E export dialog — the PDF card has an Image quality (DPI) picker, an Include bleed checkbox, and a Marks disclosure (crop / registration); a canvas-as-separate scope exports one PDF page per artboard, each resolving its own bleed independently from its own print prop.

Scope — what this is (and isn't)

• RGB only. The exported PDF is RGB with correct page-box metadata and vector marks — it is not CMYK-converted and does not claim PDF/X compliance. Your print shop's own preflight/RIP handles color conversion; this gets you a correctly-boxed, correctly-bled starting point.
• The PDF page is always vector — text and shapes never rasterize — but any raster CONTENT you put on the artboard (a dropped photo, a large-format piece authored at a fraction of its real physical size, like a billboard laid out at 1:10 scale) still embeds as a bitmap. The PDF card's DPI picker sets that bitmap's capture density; it does not turn the page itself into a raster image, and it defaults to unchanged 1× so a plain "just export a PDF" doesn't silently bloat file size.
• Prefer TTF over OTF for any custom font on a print artboard — Chromium's print pipeline outlines OTF glyphs to paths, which looks correct but loses text selectability in the exported PDF.