Some sheetfed printers require you move the start of print in order to get bleed jobs to work.
Such printers have a Top of Form signal (sometimes known as a Product Detect signal) (also referred to as a "TOF signal") that is generated from a sensor. For a non-bleed job you would want to start printing as soon as the paper reaches the printhead. For a bleed job you will want to start 1/8" early.
Do you want a different TOF setting for bleed and non bleed jobs? Perhaps.
But if not we may have a solution for your printer.
Our positioning tool (XiPosition) will resize PDFs and reposition them.
Example case:
Imagine a scenario where you get some jobs with 1/8" bleed, some with 1/4" bleed, and some with no bleed at all. You could end up with 3 TOF settings.
Or you could use XiPosition's media sizes to resize all jobs to have 1/8" bleed and set your printer to start print 1/8" before the paper reaches the printhead.
What happens to PDFs with 1/8" bleed?
Nothing.
How do they print?
The job starts printing 1/8" before the media edge, as expected.
What happens to PDFs with 1/4" bleed?
They are resized to 1/8" bleed; centered, and cropped.
How do they print?
The job starts printing 1/8" before the media edge, as expected.
What happens to PDFs with no bleed?
1/8" of empty space is added around the outside of the job. It is centered within that new space.
How do they print?
As the TOF starts the print 1/8" early, the empty space added to your PDF will "print" nothing and the job design will start printing at the edge of the paper, as you would expect. Effectively, we are adding blank space around the edge so that one TOF offset will work for any job.
We have added two media.lst files to this article. Both are for common envelope sizes.
One contains the media at their actual, stated sizes. e.g. a #10 envelope is 4.125 x 9.5 inches
The other contains the media with 1/8" bleed added to all sides. (As described in this article) e.g. a #10 envelope is 4.25 x 9.625
You can examine them to see the difference and you can install them into your copy of Navigator.
You will want to read more about media sizes and XiPosition here.