How your print is made

The cut is never exact

A press cannot place the image on the sheet perfectly, and the guillotine cannot cut in exactly the same place every time. Both are usually out by a fraction of a millimetre. A printer will only promise to land within a few millimetres of the intended edge, and everything below follows from that one fact.

Bleed: printing past the edge

If we printed exactly A2 and the cut landed a little wide, you would get a thin white stripe down one side. So we print extra map beyond every edge and let the cut fall inside it. That extra map is thrown away. It exists only so that, whatever the cut does, the map reaches the edge of the paper.

The safe area: what you are guaranteed to keep

The same tolerance works the other way. A cut can land slightly inside the intended edge, taking a sliver of map with it. For the map that does not matter, since one sliver of contour looks much like the next. It does matter for the legend, the scale bar, the attribution line and the QR code, which would look wrong clipped. Those sit well in from the edge, inside the safe area.

What this looks like in the configurator

The solid blue line is the paper you ordered. The white band straddling it is where the cut may land. Inside the band is the safe area, and the coloured boxes show where the legend, scale bar, attribution and QR code will cover the map.

In practice this only matters at the edges. If a hut, a summit or a lake sits right on the boundary of the area you have chosen, nudge the map so it is comfortably inside, rather than trusting the last few millimetres. The coloured boxes sit in the corners, so check nothing you care about is under one.

Why we do not offer a white border

A border looks like an easy option, and we deliberately do not sell one. Because the whole image can shift within that tolerance, a border printed evenly all round can arrive noticeably wider on one side than the other, and a frame is exactly where the eye notices. Printed edge to edge, the same shift is invisible. If you want a margin, a picture frame's mount will give you a perfectly even one.

Attribution

Every print carries a small attribution line naming the source of the map data, as the data licence requires. It sits in the bottom corner, inside the safe area, and the configurator shows you exactly where.