Hi musenut
This really gets into a discussion of PDF pagebox info.
The latest version of Quark 8 will let you output a PDF with all the standard pagebox information that's used to control the visible bleed or trim areas. If you create your PDFs by printing postscript, make sure to update to 8.12 since they fixed a bug that caused that info to be missing when printing postscript. If you make your PDFs by exporting .ps or PDF through the export Layout as PDF feature the info will be there in all versions of Quark 8.
The pageboxes that can be used when placing a PDF file are:
trim box - final trim size of the page, set by the page size in the original file
crop box - the cropped visible area of the file (for non-destructive cropping)
bleed box - the bleed area of the page
art box - (not used much) basically the same as the crop box
media box - the size of the "page" you're printing to
bounding box - everything on that "page" in the PDF
The program that you place or view the PDF in will control how the trim and bleed box info is used. In InDesign you can control how the PDF is placed by clicking on the "show import options" checkbox in the place window or by holding down the shift key when choosing the PDF you wish to open.
In Quark 8 there is a pull down menu at the bottom of the place window that lets you control which page box it will use when placing the PDF.
If you choose to crop to the trim box, the PDF that you place will be exactly the size of the original page, without visible bleed. If you choose to crop to the bleed box you'll get a PDF cropped to the bleed area set in your original file. If you choose media box you'll get a PDF to place that's the size of the "paper size" chosen in the original file, even if elements extend past the bleed area. If you choose bounding box the placed PDF will include everything on that page in the original file, even if it extends far past the bleed or page area.
By default if you open the PDF in Acrobat Pro you'll get the entire Media Box but the crop box can be set to hide extra data in the PDF without deleting it. If you suspect that a PDF has had the crop box set and is hiding something. You can change the view by going into Advanced ->Print Production -> Crop Pages. From there you can set the crop box to match the size of the trim or bleed boxes, which will make it so Acrobat displays just the trim or crop area--or you can change it to match the media box which will show you everything, including trim marks.
Hope this helps
Shawn
