How to add printer marks and bleeds to PDF documents

In a previous article I showed you how to add headers, footers and/or watermark to PDF documents using free software running on Linux. But that method doesn't work for bleeds and printer marks because these are supposed to be outside the page dimensions. And when overlaying two PDF documents with pdftk, it automatically resizes their pages to match. What is about to follow, is similar to the mentioned article, yet there is one important additional thing to do: increase the page size of the source PDF before adding the bleeds layer over it.

This tutorial has been made on Linux, yet the tools that I'm gonna use are cross-platform and free, so you can try it on other operating systems too. In short, to add printer marks and bleeds to a PDF document, you should generate a marks and bleeds only PDF for the source document page size, then increase pages size of the source document and at last overlay the marks and bleeds document.

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