Acrobat XI Trim Marks Bug

[coremac]

Anyone else find that printing PDFs from Acrobat XI with trim marks on the crop box instead of the trim box annoying enough to send a bug report? There is a post about it on an Adobe forum, but there's no response to it, so it might not yet be considered a bug.

 

[mattbeals]

No. Why print from Acrobat? Why have the print dialog box add the marks. Add the trim marks to the PDF first and rip/print the PDF direct. So many ways to avoid this problem.

 

[coremac]

Envelopes. Namely, we print envelopes with bleed, and need laser proofs with crop marks so that the pressman can see the correct position of the artwork. But for ripping, the PDF has to be to size (Or size plus bleed), so there can be no marks in the file. Thus, not being able to print accurate crop marks out of Acrobat leads to 20,000 envelopes with the logo 1/8" too tall.

On a philosophical note, I hate, hate, HATE, crop marks in PDFs. Partly because they're almost never set outside the bleed, but mostly because the marks on the press sheet will be from the imposition software, so there's no point in having them in the PDF. All a PDF should have is bleed, maybe slug, and a trim box, and not the ten tons of crud that end up in the file when people decide to click on all the little boxes, and I remove with Pitstop every single time.

Sorry, it just bugs me.

 

[mattbeals]

A couple of quick actions in PitStop and all those problems go away.

 

[Alith7]

I'm with coremac.
we run a number of digital shops, and they don't even have RIPs to do that with. we frequently get in PDFs that we need to print with the trims applied in acrobat. it's just the way our production flow works.
I also agree on the trim marks in PDFs. HATE them. Adobe developed the page box model for a reason. much cleaner files. that, and most people don't move out the "auto" trims when they're making a PDF, so they interfere with the bleed area, and sometimes, if we have to resize something, can even cause confusion in production if they are not removed. Total pain!

 

[Schnicklefritz]

PDFs with crops and printer marks almost always cry out for the Acrobat Touch-up object tool. When I impose the page later I don't want them possibly sneaking into the image area.

 

[DCurry]

I don't mind crops marks in a PDF so long as they are done properly and kept out of the bleed (a rarity, because Adobe's default settings do not offset the marks enough and many PDF creators never bother to change them).

They helpful to me for a couple of reasons:

1. It gives me an idea of what the client is going for. How many times have we all received artwork that is a different size than the estimate? It's usually pretty easy to figure out, but sometimes it's unclear if the client included bleed or not. This is especially true with PDFs that don't have proper page boxes set up due to some weird PDF creation method used by the client.

2. Proofs - I send loose page proofs to my Epson. Since these pages are not imposed at the time, having the crops is helpful when trimming them down.

Adobe could fix this fairly easily if they wanted to. One way would be to change the default PDF settings so that the marks offset is at least 1/8". This would help, but a better method would be to link the marks offset setting to the bleed setting, so that when you change the bleed, the offset changes to match it. If you need to override, perhaps a warning dialog could come up.

 

[Alith7]

I think the easier way for Adobe to fix it would be to give use the option of aligning to your preferred page box.

But regardless...it seems we are complaining to deaf ears.

 

[macdevin]

PDFs with crops and printer marks almost always cry out for the Acrobat Touch-up object tool. When I impose the page later I don't want them possibly sneaking into the image area.

I guess this is personal thing.. But as Matt said this is very easy to fix with Pitstop when you preflight your PDF. You are preflighting your PDF right?

 

[Schnicklefritz]

You are preflighting your PDF right?

Actually, I usually don't do a preflight. The reason being we're all digital here so I'm free of many concerns encountered by CTP offset press folks. I do preflight when I see transparency, flattening, etc. issues occuring on the Canon 7000, but that isn't often. But since so many of our customer pdfs are distilled from MS word and Publisher files, I would rather just delete crops and other printer marks with the Tools/Advanced Editing/Touch up Object Tool. Since the front/back duplexing is never dead-on, I'll get FusionPro marks with no customer generated marks getting in.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

coremac, has it always been this way with Acrobat, or only XI?

Can you post a sample file that prints incorrectly?


Stephen Marsh

 

[Alith7]

I'll let coremac respond with a file...
But from what i've seen so far, it is EVERY file. regardless of what program it was generated from.
I skipped 10, so I'm not sure, but this was NOT a problem in 9. 9 worked/works fine.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

I'll let coremac respond with a file...
But from what i've seen so far, it is EVERY file. regardless of what program it was generated from.
I skipped 10, so I'm not sure, but this was NOT a problem in 9. 9 worked/works fine.

I compared a print from Acrobat X Pro that was cropped and printed with Acrobat trims, vs. the original file with trims and bleed from InDesign.

No problems in X. Same for v9. Same for v8. All have the same result – manually cropping to the trims results in the same printed trim mark location. The crop box sets the printed trim mark position.

EDIT: If the file is cropped, then when printing with crop marks, the marks should be applied to the crop box, not the original trim box, as the act of cropping the job indicates that one is intentionally setting a new “trim area”. The printed trim marks do not appear to reference any page box except the crop box, as I tested with a file with all page boxes set to the larger media box and the crop box within the other page boxes is where the printed marks are placed.


Stephen Marsh