Handout Forge

Printing handouts

A handout that looks right on screen can still come out of a printer looking like a screenshot. Almost all of the difference is resolution, paper and one setting in the print dialog.

What 300 DPI actually means

A screen shows about 96 pixels per inch. Paper wants roughly three times that before the eye stops seeing pixels — 300 dots per inch is the number every print shop asks for. It is a ratio, not a size: 300 DPI only means something once you say how big the paper is.

Every export here is sized from the page's real dimensions in millimetres, at 300 DPI. An A4 newspaper comes out 2480 × 3508 pixels. A 63 × 88 mm card comes out 744 × 1039. The file also carries a resolution marker, so an image editor opens it at its true paper size instead of guessing 72 DPI and showing you something four times too big.

The practical consequence: do not resize the PNG before printing. It is already the right number of pixels for the paper it names. Scaling it up invents detail that was never there; scaling it down throws away detail you paid for.

Printing it yourself

In the print dialog, the setting that ruins handouts is the one that fits the image to the page. "Fit to page" and "Scale to fit" add a white margin and shrink the artwork by a few per cent, which is invisible on a newspaper and fatal on anything meant to be cut out. Choose 100%, Actual size or None instead.

Then the paper. Ordinary 80 g office paper is the right choice more often than people expect — it is thin, it creases, it yellows under a tea bag, and it feels like something that was typed rather than something that was bought. Reach for heavier stock when the object is meant to be handled repeatedly:

Matte beats glossy for almost everything. Gloss reads as modern and photographic, which is the opposite of what a 1920s letter is trying to say.

Nine cards on one sheet

A reference card is 63 × 88 mm — the same size as a playing card. Nine of them fit on an A4 sheet with room for a cutting margin, which is the cheapest way to make a deck.

Export each card separately, then place the nine PNGs on one A4 page in any layout program, a word processor included, at exactly 63 × 88 mm each. Leave a few millimetres between them so a slightly crooked cut does not eat a neighbour. Print at 100%, cut with a guillotine or a steel rule and a craft knife rather than scissors, and the edges will be straight enough to hold as a deck.

Identity cards are 86 × 54 mm, the size of a bank card, and ten fit on the same sheet.

What a print shop means by bleed

A commercial printer does not cut one card at a time. It prints a large sheet, then cuts through a stack of them, and the blade drifts by a fraction of a millimetre. If your artwork stops exactly at the edge of the card, a drift outwards leaves a white hairline down one side.

Bleed is the fix: the artwork is printed larger than the card, and the cut lands somewhere inside that margin. Two millimetres on every edge is the usual ask.

The cards, tickets and identity cards here offer a second entry under the export button that does this for you — the card plus 2 mm of bleed on each edge, so a 63 × 88 mm card exports as 67 × 92 mm. The extra band is filled from the artwork's own edge pixels, so the background continues past the cut line and the seam never shows. Send that file, tell the shop the trim size, and keep anything you care about — text especially — a few millimetres inside the edge.

For a handout you are printing at home and cutting yourself, ignore all of this and export the plain PNG. Bleed solves a problem you do not have.

Larger than A4

A newspaper front page is readable at A4 but it is not the object a newspaper is. It also exports at A3, 297 × 420 mm, rasterised at that size rather than enlarged from the smaller file, so the body text stays crisp. A3 is what makes players spread it out and lean over it, which is most of the point of handing over a newspaper at all.

Before you send anything to a shop