ID-designated PDF artbox?

[splenguin]

Hey gang,

Does anyone have information regarding setting the "other" PDF boxes [CropBox, ArtBox] in InDesign? What we're trying to do is export a single PDF with dual page sizes: one defined by Document Setup in ID as usual [TrimBox] for normal workflow, and a second, smaller, user-defined [CropBox or ArtBox] for a secondary workflow. Setting the ArtBox manually in Acrobat would negate any gains we'd make by pre-defining the ArtBox.

Thanks in advance,
Joe in Mpls

 

[Stiv]

I don't know about the boxes.
What if you set the page size to the smaller size and then added bleed bringing the page size up to the larger size?

 

[leonardr]

What we're trying to do is export a single PDF with dual page sizes: one defined by Document Setup in ID as usual [TrimBox] for normal workflow, and a second, smaller, user-defined [CropBox or ArtBox] for a secondary workflow. Setting the ArtBox manually in Acrobat would negate any gains we'd make by pre-defining the ArtBox.

The page size is fixed for any given page, and the boxes will be used in different ways.

The CropBox will cause the viewer (and printer) to only draw what is inside the Crop - so if you have bleed & trim outside of crop, then you'd lose all the stuff out there. You'd need to have Crop outside of bleed & trim, but that may not be what you really want.

Perhaps you need to rethink what you are trying to accomplish...

 

[splenguin]

You're right - I think it would have to be ArtBox, which seems to be available for just this sort of application. But how to set it in InDesign, rather than in Acrobat?

 

[Shawn]

I don't know how to do that from InDesign, you can make the media box bigger by adding a slug, but that's it as far as I know.

The best workaround I can think of would be to use an Acrobat preflight fixup to change the trimbox to whatever size you want for your secondary use. (For instance I've got one that insets the trimbox by .125 from the current mediabox to deal with Photoshop PDFs that are .25 bigger to create bleed.) Once you have your sizing figured out, save that preflight as a droplet and drag and drop the Acrobat files onto the droplet and let it batch process. You could even set the preflight fixup to add to the name indicating what workflow the PDF was for, or set the droplet to move them to a different hotfolder for processing.

Shawn

Hey gang,

Does anyone have information regarding setting the "other" PDF boxes [CropBox, ArtBox] in InDesign? What we're trying to do is export a single PDF with dual page sizes: one defined by Document Setup in ID as usual [TrimBox] for normal workflow, and a second, smaller, user-defined [CropBox or ArtBox] for a secondary workflow. Setting the ArtBox manually in Acrobat would negate any gains we'd make by pre-defining the ArtBox.

Thanks in advance,
Joe in Mpls

 

[leonardr]

You're right - I think it would have to be ArtBox, which seems to be available for just this sort of application. But how to set it in InDesign, rather than in Acrobat?

The ArtBox serves no useful purpose - don't even bother with it.