How to Add Braille to PDF Packaging Artwork (ISO 17351 & Marburg Medium)

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If you prepare medicine cartons for the European market, Braille is not optional. Directive 2004/27/EC added Article 56a to the EU medicines code, requiring the name of the product on the outer packaging in Braille. Yet the single most common misunderstanding in prepress is what the Braille in your PDF is actually for.

In the dominant production route, those dots are never printed. The carton is physically reshaped between a male and a female die, and your artwork is read as a tooling reference — a set of coordinates the die maker uses to cut the embossing tool. The Braille must then be excluded from every printing plate.

Get that mental model right and most of the other rules follow. Get it wrong and you ship a carton with printed black dots that no one can feel.

There are two routes, and they treat your file completely differently.

1. Male/female die embossing

The dominant method for folding cartons. The board is pressed between a male die and a recessed female counter-plate, pushing the dots outward from the face of the carton. It can run on the printing machine, the cutting machine, or sometimes the gluer. Your PDF supplies coordinates only — nothing images on a plate.

2. Screen-printed or UV varnish build-up

An additive alternative: a thick UV polymer varnish is layered and cured until the dot reaches the required height. Here the Braille is a real printing separation, imaged in the same pass as the graphics. It suits short runs and variable data, and it removes the alignment risk between a printed panel and a separate embossing station.

Because you often will not know which route the converter uses when you build the artwork, the safe approach is to encode the Braille so that both workflows can consume it — an identifiable non-printing layer that also carries a named spot colour. More on that below.

What you cannot control from a PDF

Dot height. The target for embossed board is 0.20 mm, and it is a function of die depth, press pressure and substrate. No PDF can express it. Every dimension you set in artwork is a plan dimension; height is a press outcome, verified on the line.

ISO 17351 (which superseded EN 15823) recommends the Marburg Medium spacing convention as the reference system for medicinal packaging. These are fixed values, not design preferences:

Two consequences designers routinely miss.

The dot diameter has a hard ceiling. Dot pitch is fixed at 2.5 mm, so a dot approaching 2.5 mm in diameter touches its neighbour inside the same cell and embosses as a single blob. Anything above roughly 2.4 mm is geometrically meaningless regardless of what your software lets you type.

You may not shrink Braille to fit. This is the rule that catches people with long product names. If the text does not fit the panel, you add a line at the 10 mm pitch — you never reduce the type. Scaling Braille down to make it fit is a compliance failure, not a clever workaround.

Historically, Braille was flagged with an ad-hoc technical spot colour whose name varied by supplier — impossible to automate against. ISO 19593-1 fixed this by defining processing steps: optional content groups carrying standardised metadata, so a RIP or prepress system can recognise non-printing production data and route it correctly.

The standard defines seven groups: Structural, Dimensions, Braille, Legend, Position, White and Varnish. Braille is a group in its own right. Only Structural and Position define named types within them, so a Braille layer legitimately carries the group with no type.

In practice a well-built file does two things at once:

• An ISO 19593-1 Braille processing-step layer — an OCG with the correct GTS_ProcStepsGroup metadata, so Esko, Prinergy and conforming RIPs treat it as production data rather than artwork.
• A named spot separation with overprint on — so if the converter takes the UV/screen route it has a real colorant to image, and so the dots never knock a white hole through the graphics beneath them.

That belt-and-braces encoding is what lets one file serve either production route. If you are building dielines and other technical layers in the same document, the same discipline applies — see our guide to custom die line creation and the wider packaging prepress workflow.

The Braille tool in PDF Press transcribes your text to uncontracted Grade-1 cells and draws them at Marburg Medium geometry, wrapped in an ISO 19593-1 Braille processing-step layer with a named Braille spot separation set to overprint.

The workflow:

1. Open your carton PDF and choose Braille from the Enhance tools.
2. Type the product name. The panel shows the resulting cell count as you type.
3. Anchor the block to one of nine points on the trim, bleed or media box, then nudge it with X/Y offsets or drag it directly in the live preview.
4. Set the dot base diameter. The field warns when you leave the 1.3–1.6 mm Marburg range instead of silently accepting a value the die maker cannot tool.
5. Export. The Braille rides on its own layer, ready for the toolmaker or the varnish screen.

What the tool does not do

Being explicit about scope matters more here than in most prepress work, because the output feeds a regulated artifact:

• Grade-1 only. No contracted (Grade-2) Braille. That matches the guidance for medicinal packaging, which calls for uncontracted Braille except on very small volumes.
• English letter values. Accented characters have no cell in the table and are reported as skipped rather than silently dropped — but a name like "Paracétamol" needs the target language's Braille code, which means a certified transcription.
• One line at a time. Multi-line blocks at the 10 mm line pitch are not yet generated automatically.
• No dot height. As covered above, that is a press and tooling parameter.

Treat the output as a correctly-encoded layout, not as a transcription authority. Always proof against a certified source before tooling.

1. Emitting capital signs

There is no capitalisation in Braille on folding cartons. A capital indicator (dot 6) before an uppercase letter adds a cell that should not be embossed and shifts everything after it by one 6 mm pitch. If your software "helpfully" capitalises, it is producing a wrong file.

2. Using a lookalike Braille font

Desktop and decorative Braille fonts encode aesthetics, not geometry. Substituting one is a well-documented cause of regulatory non-conformance. The spacing has to be Marburg Medium, measured.

3. Ignoring the 8 mm keep-out

Keep at least 8 mm between the edge of a dot and the centre of any cutting line, crease or perforation. This — not the panel size — is usually what limits how many 10 mm-pitch lines you can fit.

4. Shrinking to fit

Covered above, and worth repeating because it is the most tempting shortcut. Add a line; never scale the cells.

5. Sharing a colour with live artwork

Braille must sit on its own layer with a colour used by nothing else, so it can be cleanly separated out. If it shares process black with your body copy, it cannot be isolated for tooling.

6. Adding Braille last

Specify it in the artwork from the start. Retrofitting it after the layout is locked is how Braille ends up over a crease, under a label, or crowding a barcode. If you are already planning code placement, our notes on QR codes for packaging cover the same keep-out thinking.

The regulatory baseline is the product name. Strength and pharmaceutical form are added conditionally — the accepted reading is that you include them when the product exists in more than one strength or form, which is precisely when a patient could confuse two packs. Single strength, single form generally means one line carrying the name.

That content rule is why two lines is the common maximum on a typical carton panel, even though validated embossing can run to around eight lines.

A short sign-off checklist

• Transcription verified against a certified source — not against your own software.
• Geometry measured, not eyeballed: 2.5 mm dot pitch, 6.0 mm cell pitch, 10.0 mm line pitch.
• Dot base diameter inside 1.3–1.6 mm.
• 8 mm clear of every cut, crease and perforation.
• Braille isolated on its own layer and separation; confirmed absent from the printing plates if the route is die embossing.
• Tactile check performed by an actual Braille reader. Sighted proxies are not a substitute — a sighted finger consistently over-rates legibility.

Substrate matters too: heavily coated or inconsistent board can burst at the dot, and very stiff stock limits achievable height, while soft board deforms in distribution. If your job also involves UV build-up, the UV printing file prep guide covers raised-varnish setup in more depth. For the broader compliance picture on regulated packs, see product label compliance printing.