Once your sheets come out of the printer you have to cut them accurately, and the paper gives you no clue where the poster ends and the margin begins. These two options print that clue.
Both are set in the export preview, and both are drawn in the margin band, so both want a margin. What happens at margin 0 is covered at the end of this page.
Cut lines
Five options, under Lines:
| Option | What it draws |
|---|---|
| Off | Nothing. |
| Dashed Lines | A dashed stroke edge to edge, across the artwork. |
| Solid Lines | A solid stroke edge to edge, across the artwork. |
| Dashed Corners | A dashed cross at each corner only. |
| Solid Corners | A solid cross at each corner only. |
The word that carries the meaning is Lines versus Corners. Lines run the full width and height of the printable area, straight across your image. Corners mark the same cut position with a small cross at each corner and leave the artwork alone in between.
Which to use
- Corners for anything photographic or dark. This is the crop-mark idiom from professional print, and it is the better default: the cut position is marked while the artwork stays clear apart from a short stub of each arm reaching in from the corner.
- Lines when you want a continuous edge to run a blade along, or when the artwork is light enough that a stroke across it does not matter.
- Solid is easier to see; dashed is less obtrusive on a busy image.
Anything a cut guide draws over is printed on the sheet. If you cut on the line, most of it is removed with the margin — but a line style that runs across the artwork will leave its trace on the assembled poster if your cut wanders. Corners reduce that to four short stubs rather than removing it.
One more thing worth knowing if you use overlap: a cut guide drawn over a dark overlap strip can be effectively invisible, whatever style you pick. The guide is still there; there is just not enough contrast to see it.
Scissor marks
A small scissors icon printed in the margin band, just outside the cut line it marks and centred along it. It tells you at a glance which side of the sheet is meant to be trimmed, which matters when you are holding a stack of forty identical-looking sheets.
Scissor marks are an on/off choice, under Scissors.
They scale with the margin, up to a point: in size mode the icon stops growing at around a 0.50 in margin, so 0.75 and 1.00 give the same size. In grid mode it keeps growing with the margin.
They are drawn by the export, not by your layers
Cut guides and scissor marks are produced by the export itself, so they are always drawn on top of your artwork and cannot be sent behind it. You cannot reorder them with the layers panel — the only control is on and off.
At margin 0
There is no reliable margin band to draw into, and the two modes diverge:
- Grid mode hides the scissor marks. Full-line cut styles may still be drawn at the very edge of the sheet in the browser and desktop apps, where the mobile apps draw nothing.
- Size mode usually still has slack, because the sheets over-cover the poster. The outer sheets are drawn into that slack, so marks can still appear.
If you want the guides, set a margin. 0.50 in is the value that makes all of this predictable — see margins.