Crop Mark Offset

[kyle]

When you place a PDF in Indesign, if you select "Show Import Options," you will get a dialog that lets you choose what box Indesign will crop the PDF to.

The bleed is added when exporting in the "Marks and Bleeds" category, and if you set bleeds and turn off marks, you'll get a PDF that is exactly the size of trim plus bleeds without any marks.

 

[Widmark]

I've dealt with enough printers of enough skill levels that I would be worried that somebody would come back and say "your image is too big...and there's no bleed!"

As mentioned above, it's all in the communication, but often there is none. I'm preparing files that are being sent to someone else, who send them to someone else in China, who sends them to a vendor, etc.

 

[kyle]

If you make a PDF with added bleed and no marks, the trim box still indicates the intended trimmed size. This doesn't work if you create an oversized document where the bleed is inside the page, but neither would the automatically generated marks. I always check the trim box to find out what the original document size was and determine if I have the correct size plus bleed versus an incorrect size without bleed.

 

[frailer]

Film/shmilm. If I get an incoming ad for placement in one of our publications, I preferr to see Crop/Trim marks. Then I have some idea that the supplier/generator had some idea of what our page size is, (3 of the four are non-standard; A4 is the only regular one we use).
In the absence of these, it's a suck-and-see exercise of measuring what they've given me to see if they had some idea of the intended size, and, more to the point, whether they had bleed in mind at the time. And we all know, bleed is the No. 1 bane of our lives.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Well if you all, and your clients go into the official wish form and ask for it I think the chances are fairly high
I understand that if you have a good reason, and there isn't a good reason why not, then you are likeley to be heard, and see a change.

while you're at it please help me push for Total ink in Photoshop and Illustrator

 

[Gregg]

This has been a very enlightening post - dealing with a topic that I think many people take for granted. I, personally, had always just set my offset for 12pt (no matter how much bleed the job required). My new practice, after reading all the replies to this post, is to set the offset to whatever the bleed is. When creating book covers 15mm of bleed is required, so my offset will be 15mm. When creating book jackets 5mm of bleed is required, so my offset will be 5mm.

I have found that more and more print vendors do not want the bleed marks included, stating that they just delete them anyway. Do you all find the same to be true?

 

[Tech]

I never include bleed marks in our PDFs. Some vendors don't even want crop marks, but they can always remove what they don't want.

 

[rich apollo]

I never include bleed marks in our PDFs. Some vendors don't even want crop marks, but they can always remove what they don't want.

What if you have hundreds of pages per day submitted by folks thinking that way?

Any editing of PDFs involves risk. While removing the crop marks, you never know what else might disappear. If you give the printer what he/she asks for, you're much more likely to get what you expect in return.

 

[Tech]

What if you have hundreds of pages per day submitted by folks thinking that way?

Any editing of PDFs involves risk. While removing the crop marks, you never know what else might disappear. If you give the printer what he/she asks for, you're much more likely to get what you expect in return.

What risks are you referring to? I set crop marks at least 1.25" offset, that is plenty for anyone to safely crop out what they dont need or want.

Ideally, you want to give vendors exactly what they want. Ideally, I also only want to deal with just one vendor with best service, pricing, etc. but we don't. Ten vendors with ten different settings, twenty vendors with twenty settings... you get the idea... it's not practical.

 

[Wolfie]

I prefer having the crop marks slightly inside the bleed.
When I impose it and preps adds the crop marks I can then see the overlap of both Preps and the pdf crop marks so I know the size is correct.
Also I guess if you imposing and the imposition software can't add crop marks, you stuck having to increase the page size so you can see the pdf crop marks.
Try exporting a pdf with the crop marks outside the bleed, then printing an A1 proof on a 24" proofer and then trim it down to size, it wont fit on the page unless you crop it and it wont have any crop marks.

 

[Mysterio2099]

I've always wanted it to default to 0.125". That's what we use for bleeds.

 

[michaelejahn]

the problem with defaults

the problem with defaults

I've always wanted it to default to 0.125". That's what we use for bleeds.

I would suggest that since 92% of the documents that are created using applications like Word today do not get printed, and that less far less than 50% of the documents that are created in Quark and InDesign even have bleed at all, I would suggest that the default should have no bleed whatsoever. I would also suggest that any designer that wants bleed should contact his print service supplier and ask instead of using some silly application default.

Like "default screen angles" or "default trap amounts' there is a greater percentage that you guess wrong.