InDesign / Acrobat Slugs - Production Information

[PrepressOverlord]

A pharma client of ours is requesting the addition of document information within the slug of our PDF proofs. I receive this information from agencies often, but never has it been a requirement for us to provide it on our prepared PDFs. I contacted Heidelberg to see if their rip has a solution. It does not. Are any of you providing this information to a client at the production stage? This is common in the design stage, but after my team disassembles and reassembles an agency's artwork that slug is long gone.

Considering I need to add this to outgoing prepared PDFs, is this something that can be added in Acrobat?

Searching through this forum, I found a reference to Mechanical Squared by Triple Triangle. Anyone still use this? The website looks dated... Googling only finds results from the early 2000's.

Thanks!!

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Conceivably you could add this information within InDesign, placing it outside of the page's BleedBox but within the page's MediaBox.

 

[Magnus59]

You could create a Pitstop action to add this information.

 

[Tom Peire]

Triple Triangle was/is indeed the most convenient product to do this with in InDesign. I would just reach out to them, but indeed their website looks dated.

Here are two educational (quite technical and detailed) video's on how to achieve this on a PDF with callas pdfToolbox.
Getting started with place content (part 1) - YouTube
Getting started with place content (part 2) - YouTube

If you need/want assistance, feel free to reach out

 

[loica]

@PrepressOverlord Indeed PitStop will easily let you manage boxes and add content that your Pharma customer requires whatever it's a static content or a dynamic content using variables.
See the following example (here is the top left corner of the PDF file):

All we need, is 3 basic instructions:
- Edit Mediabox (just extend top dimension)
- Edit Cropbox (not mandatory actually but more comfortable for visualisation)
- Add Text Object (we are using a variable here: "PharmaContent").

Now, we just run the action list. This will ask for the text to be displayed (if you need something dynamic)

And then the result:

Couldn't be easier.

And it can be automated in an Enfocus Switch/PitStop Server workflow for higher volume of production.

 

[PrepressOverlord]

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, we could create this in InDesign, but with the number of jobs, it would be too time consuming. Also, human error would probably be an issue and QC would have another chance to ding Prepress.

We all have Pitstop, so that is an option I will explore. This morning, we started editing the preflight report from Heidelberg to try and trim it down enough not to confuse the client. This may be a solution. It will not be a slug, but we could include it with the PDF proofs.

 

[PrepressOverlord]

Thanks for the Pitstop info! Just getting started exploring this. This looks to be a better solution than the preflight report.

 

[PrepressOverlord]

YES! The Pitstop Action was the solution. Hope the client accepts this. I don't have Pitstop Server, so I will have to automate this some way. Maybe an Automator script...

Thanks to all!

 

[loica]

You can still ask for a trial, process the job, evaluate how valuable PitStop Server is for your business and decide.

 

[tunder.lala]

What kind of Heidelberg RIP are you using? If it is Prinect, it can place info on proof pdf-s as slug.

 

[PrepressOverlord]

What kind of Heidelberg RIP are you using? If it is Prinect, it can place info on proof pdf-s as slug.

Is that slug a mark I would add in Signa? Looking now....

 

[tunder.lala]

I mean if you are using Prinect, you should use PDF Proof sequence and it can add slugline automatically to the created proof pdf.

 

[FerretFace]

We use a PitStop action as well. You can set them up to do virtually anything.