PDF file with crop marks

Hello,

It is a widely-accepted practice here in this country that printing
companies want data in the PDF format. Now I'm told to send a PDF file
with crop marks exported. An easy pie for InDesign but is it possible
to do this in PageStream 5?

Regards,
Daniel

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Daniel Jedlicka wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It is a widely-accepted practice here in this country that printing
> companies want data in the PDF format. Now I'm told to send a PDF file
>; with crop marks exported. An easy pie for InDesign but is it possible
> to do this in PageStream 5?
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>
>

Hi Daniel,

I make a PostScript version of the document first, which is then made in
a PDF.
From the menu: File / Print...
Include Printers' Marks in Options, you can edit even the offset or length.
(You can fiddle with the (Scale) Size when the resulting PDF is not what
you like.)

With the Setup... I choose printer <PostScript File> and Send to:
PostScript File.
For the PPD I choose one of the Adobe which came with PGS 5.0.4.17
(earlier versions didn't had those - or download this from the Adobe
website).
Make sure that the (Paper) Size is the one you use.

This should give you crop marks (plus: density control bar, slur gauge,
registration mark and page slug).

Theo

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On Sunday 06 July 2008, Daniel Jedlicka wrote:
&gt; Hello,
&gt;
> It is a widely-accepted practice here in this country that printing
> companies want data in the PDF format. Now I'm told to send a PDF file
>; with crop marks exported. An easy pie for InDesign but is it possible
> to do this in PageStream 5?

If I needed this I would print to postscript and then convert it to PDF.
However, I have an immediate thought:

I expect the reason this is not an option in PgS is that it produces the PDF
such that each page is at the actual page size which means there is no room
for putting crop marks. So I take it InDesign automatically increases the
page size when crop marks are selected? How large do they make the crop
marks? Or does it shrink the page contents sufficiently to show the crop
marks? If so, then how much does it shrink them? Or does it do something
else?

If I were to use my suggested solution above it would be necessary to specify
a printer page size larger than the one actually to be used so that the crop
marks would show. The only time I have used crop marks myself is when
printing something on US Letter that was smaller than that (e.g., CD liner
notes) and in fact I used the crop marks to do actual cropping.

I'm sure it is simply lack of real publishing experience on my part, but it
just seems troublesome to me to have the document produced at other than the
desired size -- either at the finished product page size or at the printer
page size. Which brings me to a second thought:

Is this a single page print job? If not, will it be using signatures? Facing
pages? I would think alignment of the pages when printing both sides would be
problematic unless the PDF were produced at the printer page size. And
printing signatures isn't going to work right if each page is produced
individually having its own crop marks.

In sum:

In PgS I would do this via printing to postscript then converting that to PDF
with ghostscript (this is a simple work flow for me as I use linux), but I
would want to know how the printed file should be produced: e.g., what size
for the page with crop marks, what signature and so on.

Tim Doty

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