The print-ready PDF checklist for restaurant menus

A print-ready PDF is a file a press operator can output without opening it in a design program, asking a question or making a judgement call. Most menu files that arrive at a printer are not that. They are RGB, the fonts are missing, the page is exactly A4 with no bleed, and the black text is made of four inks. Each of those causes either a delay, an email, or a menu that looks worse than the screen. This checklist covers what to verify before you send, in the order a prepress operator would check it.

1. Page geometry: trim, bleed and safe zone

The PDF page size must be the trim size plus bleed on all four sides. For an A4 menu, that is 210 × 297 mm plus 3 mm bleed each side, so a PDF page of 216 × 303 mm. For A5, 154 × 216 mm. Bleed is the area beyond the trim line that gets cut away; any colour or image that reaches the edge of the finished menu must extend across it, or the guillotine's ±1 mm tolerance leaves a white sliver.

Inside the trim, keep text and anything important at least 5 mm from the edge, the safe zone. Crop marks should sit outside the bleed so they are never printed on the finished piece. A PDF that has the trim box, bleed box and media box set correctly lets the press software impose it without manual measurement.

For a bifold, the PDF should be two pages, outside and inside, each at the open size with bleed, not four single panels. A 3 mm bleed applies around the whole spread, and the fold line falls at the exact centre of each page.

2. Colour: CMYK, rich black and the right profile

Every colour in the file should be CMYK or a named spot colour, never RGB. RGB elements convert at the press with unpredictable results; a warm terracotta on screen turns muddy brown in print. Convert images and swatches yourself, so you see the result before the printer does.

Text and fine lines in black should be 100 % K only, so misregistration of 0.1 mm does not fringe every letter with colour. Large black areas, a dark cover or a full-bleed background, should be a rich black such as C60 M40 Y40 K100, which prints deeper than K alone. The two must not be mixed in a way that creates a visible boundary: a K-only headline sitting on a rich-black panel shows as a slightly greyer rectangle.

Set the output intent to the profile your printer uses. In Europe that is usually Fogra39, also called ISO Coated v2, for coated papers, or PSO Uncoated for uncoated stock. Total ink coverage should not exceed 300 to 320 % in any area on coated paper; higher values dry slowly and set off onto the next sheet.

3. Images: resolution and format

Every raster image must be at least 300 pixels per inch at the size it is placed on the page. A photograph placed at 100 × 70 mm needs to be about 1180 × 830 pixels; a full-bleed A4 background needs about 2550 × 3600. Scaling a small image up in the layout does not add detail, and 150 dpi looks acceptable on screen and visibly soft on 350 g board.

Logos and illustrations should be vector wherever possible. A logo pasted in as a PNG from a website is the single most common cause of a blurry menu. Images should be embedded, not linked, and any transparency effects, drop shadows or blend modes should be flattened or at least tested, because they are the second most common cause of output errors.

4. Fonts: embedded or outlined

All fonts must be embedded in the PDF. If a font is missing, the press software substitutes another and your carefully chosen serif becomes Courier without anyone being told. Check with the document properties of your PDF reader: every font should say embedded or embedded subset. Some fonts have licences that forbid embedding; those must be converted to outlines before export.

Minimum sizes still matter at this stage. Body text on a menu should not go below 9 pt; fine print such as allergen codes should not go below 7 pt; reversed white text on a dark background should be at least 8 pt and preferably a weight heavier than the same text in black.

5. Standards and export settings

• Export as PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4. PDF/X-1a flattens transparency and forces CMYK, which is the safest choice for most digital and offset presses. PDF/X-4 keeps live transparency and is fine for modern workflows; ask your printer which they prefer.
• No compression below high quality for images, and no downsampling below 300 dpi.
• Crop marks on, offset by at least 3 mm from the trim so they sit in the bleed area or beyond. Registration marks and colour bars are optional for digital printing.
• Single pages, not spreads, unless the printer specifically asks for imposed spreads. Each face of the menu is its own page in the file.
• No printer marks, guides, hidden layers or comments left in the file. Delete unused layers before export; some workflows print them.

6. The final ten-minute check

Open the exported PDF in a reader with output preview, turn on separations and overprint preview, and look at the file as the press will see it. Check that the black text disappears when you turn off the K channel and stays clean when you turn off C, M and Y. Check the page size in the document properties. Zoom to 400 % on the smallest text and the logo edges. Then print it on your office printer at 100 % scale and read it aloud: prices, allergens, spellings.

Finally, name the file so the printer and your future self can tell what it is: venue, menu type, format, version, date. A file called final_v3_FINAL.pdf will be reprinted by mistake in eighteen months.

What this looks like when the tooling does it for you

Most of this list exists because layout software leaves the choices to the designer. When the output pipeline is built for print from the start, the checklist collapses to reading the proof. In Menu Atelier every export is a PDF at 300 dpi with 3 mm bleed and crop marks, CMYK colour, embedded fonts and the correct page geometry for the format you chose, whether A4 or A5, single sheet or bifold, one or two sides. You still read it aloud before you print; the rest of the list is already done.