How it works

Getting started

Sign up with your email address. There is no password: we email you a 6-digit code (valid for 10 minutes, five tries) or, if you prefer, a sign-in link (valid once, for 10 minutes). Google sign-in appears when it is switched on. A session lasts 30 days.

Your account comes with a personal workspace that only you can see. The first time you sign in, a short setup lets you start a team workspace, try the sample document or upload your own, and connect the terminal or Claude Code. You can skip any step.

To protect your inbox, we send at most three codes or links a minute to one address. If one doesn’t arrive, check your spam folder, then wait a minute and ask again.

The web app

Workspaces

Projects, credits and the plan belong to a workspace, not to a person. You always have your personal workspace, and you can create team workspaces from the switcher at the top left. Switch between them there; each has its own address, /app/<name>.

Projects

A project is one Markdown file and its images. Choose New project, then pick the file and its images, drop them, or drop the whole folder; or start from the sample. Only the images the document uses are sent, by the names it uses, and the text is never changed. The limits: the Markdown up to 2 MB, and up to 40 PNG or JPEG images, 20 MB each and 60 MB in all.

Then design: Quick design lays the document out as a report and a magazine with the free offline designer (it costs only its renders). Click a page to see it large, and lock the pages you approve; a later change that would move a locked page is refused. Export for screen, print or press: print and press need a print copy of a design (with bleed), and come with the preflight report on the page. Before anything that spends credits you see about how many it takes.

Every change is a revision with the name of the person who made it (or “Quick design” for the offline designer’s rounds), and any revision can be restored: reverting adds a new revision, so nothing in the history is lost.

Share links

Editors can make a read-only link to one rendition of a project: anyone with it sees its pages and can download its PDF, without signing in. A link is shown once (we keep only a fingerprint of it), can expire after a day, a week, 30 or 90 days, and stops working at once when it is revoked or the project goes to the trash. Shared pages are never listed by search engines.

The trash

Editors can move a project to the trash: it leaves the list and its share links stop, but its files are kept and anyone who can edit can restore it from Trash for 30 days (its share links then work again). While it is in the trash nobody can change it, in the web app, the terminal designer or Claude Code, which don’t list it. After 30 days it is deleted for good. Admins and the owner can also delete a project in the trash at once.

Inviting people

Owners and admins invite people by email from Members, with a role. The invitation link is valid for 14 days; the person signs in with the address it was sent to (which must be verified) and accepts. On the Free plan a team workspace has 3 seats, and pending invitations count; cancelling one frees its seat.

Roles

Admins can’t change or remove other admins; only the owner grants or removes the admin role. Ownership moves only with Transfer ownership in Settings, which makes the old owner an admin.

Leaving and deleting

• Anyone but the owner can leave a team workspace from Settings.
• The owner deletes a team workspace by typing its name. Its projects go with it.
• You can delete your account from Account settings by typing your email, if you signed in within the last 24 hours. It deletes your personal workspace and any team workspace you are alone in. While you own a team with other members, transfer ownership first.

Feedback

Choose Send feedback in the account menu (your initial, top right) inside any workspace. Tell us what worked, what didn’t or what you need; it goes straight to the people building Imprintal.

The terminal designer

A designer you talk to in your terminal. Run it in the folder that holds your Markdown and images. It needs Node.js 20.3 or later and nothing else:

• The first time, it opens your browser to sign in with your Imprintal account, and remembers you on that computer.
• It works in a workspace you choose, and its work draws on that workspace’s credits.
• Results (PDFs, page images, preflight reports) are downloaded to ./designer-output/<project>/ next to your files.
• Type what you want in plain words. /help lists the commands: /projects, /open to open a PDF, /cost, /resume for an earlier session, and /exit.
• When a new version is published it tells you, with the new line to run.

Claude Code

Add Imprintal to Claude Code once, from any terminal:

Then, in Claude Code, run /mcp, choose imprintal and sign in with your account in the browser. Ask for what you want (“use publication-designer to make a report from notes.md”). The tools act in your workspace and use its credits, exactly as the web app and the terminal designer do.

Print and press

There are three ways out: screen (an RGB PDF for reading), print (an RGB PDF with bleed and the marks you ask for) and press (the print PDF converted to CMYK PDF/X-4 for a named printing condition). Print and press exports come with a preflight report.

Bleed

Bleed is set per edge, 3 mm unless your printer says otherwise; spreads use inside and outside. Art that touches the trim runs through the bleed, and everything inside the trim stays exactly as designed. If pages are locked, the print version is made as a copy, so your approved screen pages don’t move.

Marks

Crop marks, bleed marks and a page-information line sit in the slug, outside the bleed. Registration marks and colour bars are for press files only. All marks are off unless you ask; many printers want none. You can have single pages, which printers impose themselves, or reader spreads for proofing.

Printing conditions

For a press file, the designer asks which printing condition your printer names. It never picks one for you.

The condition’s ICC profile becomes the PDF’s output intent. Text stays text, vectors stay vectors and transparency stays live.

Black

Small near-black text is set in 100% black ink only (K-only) and overprints, so it can’t print with coloured fringes. Dark neutral greys become a tint of black. Large dark areas get the condition’s rich black. Coloured text and everything else go through the profile.

The preflight report

Every print and press export comes with a report, as Markdown and as a short PDF, headed PRINT READY or NOT READY. It lists the trim and bleed, the page boxes, the output intent, any RGB left, fonts (embedded, none Type 3), ink coverage against the condition’s limit, black text, white overprint and every image’s resolution at its printed size, plus warnings such as small or reversed type. Send it to your printer with the files.

Colour is converted by Ghostscript and the press checks are our own self-check against PDF/X-4. It is not a certified PDF/X validation, so your printer’s preflight has the final word.

Checks

Hard checks block an export: text that overflows its frame, a word of your document missing from the pages, a font that isn’t bundled and embedded, wrong page geometry, marks too close to the art, art that stops short of the bleed, and images under 150 ppi at their printed size. The designer can’t weaken a hard check to make its own design pass.

Soft checks are advice: a near-empty page, a heading stranded at the foot of a page, loose lines, low contrast over a picture, a figure far from where it is cited, small type, images under 250 ppi. Each comes with the option that may fix it.

Your text is never rewritten, shortened or shrunk to fit. If something can’t fit, you are told what and where.

Credits and limits

Each workspace gets 300 credits a month on the Free plan, and each person can spend about 100 a day, counted across all their workspaces by email address. Your email address must be verified before anything is spent (signing in with a code or a link verifies it).

A call that would go over the workspace’s month, your daily cap, or the service’s own daily limit for everyone (it keeps a free beta affordable) is refused before it starts, with a message saying which limit and when it renews. Every call reserves the most it could cost first and is settled from what was actually used, never more than it reserved (a design run with the model reserves at most 40 credits, and if it reaches that it stops and says what it finished); output is counted even when a reply is cut short. The workspace’s usage page shows credits left, who used what and each person’s cap.

To keep the service fair there are also rate limits on sign-in, invitations and changes; if you hit one, wait a minute. See Pricing.

Privacy basics

• Your documents, images, renders, generated images and exports are stored in your workspace on Cloudflare, visible only to its members (and to anyone you send a share link).
• To design, parts of your document and page images are sent to the model provider (Anthropic, through Cloudflare’s AI Gateway). Images are generated only when you say yes.
• Nothing about how a page was made is printed on it: no credits, colophons or AI labels.
• Deleting a workspace deletes its projects; deleting your account deletes your personal workspace.

The details are in the Privacy Policy and the Terms.