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, real embedded fonts for most faces, see Fonts below); the bleed/marks/box work is a pdf-lib pass over that same vector page, never a re-render.
• Font preflight + outlining — every PDF export checks whether its fonts are actually printable, and the Text picker can convert all text to curves for a print shop that will not take anything less.

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

# ...and with all text on curves, so no font can fail the printer's preflight
/design:export pdf --scope artboard --option includeBleed=true --option marks=crop,registration --option text=outline

# 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, a Text picker (keep selectable / verify fonts embedded / convert to outlines), 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.

Fonts — the one thing that can still fail preflight

Chromium embeds most faces properly, but two cases it cannot: a colour font (COLRv1 / @font-palette-values) and a synthetic italic (your CSS asks for italic and no real italic face is loaded). Both come out as Type 3 fonts — a per-glyph content stream rather than a font program. On screen they look right; a print shop's preflight reports them as not embedded and rejects the file, and Acrobat or Illustrator renders them broken.

Every PDF export now checks for this and tells you, naming the faces. The Text picker decides what to do about it:

Outlining preserves the print boxes, the vector crop/registration marks, and every photo's pixel count and ppi — it will not quietly resample or recompress your raster content.

A flagged synthetic italic is worth fixing at the source instead: load the real italic face and the Type 3 font disappears, with the text still selectable.