How do you add crop/cut marks in Indesign CS4

[_Adil_Khan_]

Hi guys, as mentioned in my other thread also, im very new to indesign and was wondering how to add crop and fold marks in indesign. Furthermore how flexible am I using them i.e. can i manually move them around also.

I have looked in my indesign pre installed scripts and there is something called cropmarks.applescript but how do i actually apply this. Also what would be good is if i could add fold marks for situations where im designing tri panel brochures.

Thanks

p.s. im using mac

[Dov Isaacs]

Crop and cut marks (and other "printer marks") can be readily selected as part of the PDF export feature as well as in the print dialogue. There is no normal reason to manually create these.

- Dov

[mckayk_777-PN6kWE]

Disagree very much, In the printing industry there are many times you need to place trim/crop/perferation marks and if your going to put them on why not the rest, takes no time at all to do, I have 3 scripts that every time I start a job adds the required layers, Guides & Crop marks. I surpose they come into printing more with things like Invoice Statement books, business cards and such like.

[Jongware]

And

>fold marks for situations where im designing tri panel brochures

should appear on the slug area. If you create a new document, be sure to pop up "More options". Bleed is important! That's a "safe area" around the actually printed area, to cater for people with runaway knifes. So don't put anything there that doesn't belong.
"Slug", however, adds yet even
i more
space around the document, and that's the area where one would put information for the printer, such as job name, color names, and any additional stuff such as spine folds (for book covers) or your folding lines.

Don't forget the Export PDF dialog has options to manually allow or suppress bleed & slug. You should use the one defined in your document.

You can put folding lines right on top of your page
i on a separate layer.
That way you can see what you're doing while designing (always handy), and you can make a print-out with the layer
b visible
for the printer. Then make a final production PDF (ask your printer!) with that same layer set to
b invisible.

[_Adil_Khan_]

Hi guys, thanks for the replies. Some very good info provided there.

Naturally I always add a 5mm bleed and a 5mm margin to my work. Regarding the slug, how much would you recommend I add for the slug.

Regarding the printing, I am actually printing myself on a xerox dc 242 on SRA3 paper.

Likewise my next problem would be laying two copies of a 11"x8.5" brochure on one SRA3 sheet and including crop marks per copy i.e. crop marks for 1 copy and relevant marks for the other copy. How would i do this.

Furthermore can the crop marks not be added whilst working in Indesign itself rather than have them appear once exported

One more thing, since you mention exporting in pdf, would this be necessary if I have the printer connect to the machine im designing on i.e. meaning can i not an indesign extension?

thanks

[Jongware]

What a lot of questions. Let me see how far I get.

Slug -- well, I suppose you're printing on a much larger sheet. You can treat everything up to the physical size of the sheets as 'slug', but 10-20 mm should be enough for anything you need to put there. Remember, it's outside the actually used area of your design.

2 copies on the same page -- in that case you cannot use ID's default crop marks and you will have to draw your own. See next:

Crop marks -- sure, you can draw anything you like, anywhere you want. As long as they're outside the actual design. Dov's remark applies to 'standard' documents (ads, pages for a book), but as long as you restrain yourself to the simple rules of crop marks (don't place them near art -- overlapping the bleed area and running into the slug area is good; use as thin lines as your output device can handle, but not less than 0.25 points; use [Registration] color, even if you don't intend to colour-separate, as you never know what will happen with the document in the future). For further safety, put them onto a separate layer, so you can switch them to invisible with a single push of a button in the Layers palette.
Take a look at ID's own crop mark options to see what you need: the actual crop marks themselves, perhaps registration marks as well (the circle things in the center of the slug area) to align multiple copies (easier to cut), perhaps color bars (to check the quality of the colors). Adding the job name and date (for archiving hard copies) never hurts.
The script you mentioned earlier adds crop marks to a selection of objects on the screen, but I've never needed it so can't vouch for its usefulness. Is the script in your Scripts Panel? If not, copy it to the correct location (for a Mac -- where?), select an object and double-click the script to see what it does.

As for printing, well, opinions may differ. Directly printing from ID should work just fine, but -- again -- for safety reasons, you might want to export to PDF, check everything with Acrobat, and print from there. Having the document as PDF ensures you can send the document directly to another printer.

(Phew what a long post.)

[mckayk_777-PN6kWE]

The script is a very handy one indeed at least in my workflow, you select an object (I usually draw a box around the page and select it) and then run the scrip it adds crop marks in all 4 corners. You can also edit the script so it makes the crop marks to the size and thickness & distance away from the trim that you require. Once setup life is just that one more step easier. It also automatically places the crop marks on a separate layer for you.

[_Adil_Khan_]

Wow reeally appreciate the effort in your reply matey. I think youve helped me a great deal there. I was intending on using a 5mm slug to be honest but thought id confirm what you guys think. So i suppose I should be ok.

So am I right in thinking that it is good practice to print one copy of the layout with crop marks and use that as the template for cutting the remainder copies.

Regarding IDs own crop mark options, I cant seem to really find them anywhere other than seeing the aforementioned script present in applications/Adobe Indesign CS4/Scripts/Scripts Panels/Samples/AppleScripts

I cant actually select such an option within indesigns own drop down menu

[mckayk_777-PN6kWE]

I am using CS4, The only crop marks are in that script panel and when you are ready to print the job you can also tell indesign to print crop marks, I find the script better as you have more control over where the crop marks are and if you need say perforation or fold marks you just copy the crop marks made by the script to where you want the extras to be. I use the same bleed and sludge settings on all my jobs and make templates for most things ie business cards 4up or 8up etc... the sludge if the same on both the main doc and the template makes it vere easy to place the pdf's on the template, both being 15mm or whatever you choose the bounding box will of the pdf will place right on the sludge of the template and be lined up nicely.

[Karen Farrell]

Maybe I am just dense, and I am stumped by how InDesign does a lot of things. I am printing a DVD cover on 8.5 x 11 photo paper, and I cannot for the life of me get the crop marks to come out in the right place. I've tried changing the page size, margins, bleed, and slug, and they always come out wrong. Can anyone please tell me what combination of settings I need to use to get the crop marks (or even use bleed marks as crop marks for cutting) to come out correctly. (I'm going to cut it myself.)

Thanks!

Karen

Also, I'm using CS5.

Message was edited by: farrelldoc

[Mr. Met]

You're using crops for the 8.5 x 11 page most likely. Draw a box around the CD cover which is 5x5 or something in that ballpark. Select box. Go to scripts>make crops. Done.

[Karen Farrell]

Thank you! That did add the crop marks, but at the same time, it resized the page content (smaller). I suppose InDesign in trying to "help" because it thinks if I'm trimming that little amount that I must need wider margins (and my margins, slug, and bleed are all set to 0,0 after much experimenting and wasted paper and ink). When I print without the crop marks, the size is right on, but with the crop marks, everything is shrunk.

What I ended up doing was just placing the box over the content and drawing manual crop marks. I would really like to figure out how the automagic marks will work for me in the future; however, InDesign just doesn't seem to like me. (And I have taken the lynda.com course on it, believe it or not.)

Thanks again for your help!

Karen

[Peter Spier]

If things have shrunk in the print, it usually means you enabled "scale to fit printable area" in the print dialog. It sounds as if perhaps the doc size is as large as the printable area on the sheet and the automatic crop marks that ID will add under marks and bleed are falling into the non-imageable area of the printer.

[Peter Spier]

You really should be setting up the document at the trim size of the finished DVD cover. Add a bleed allowance in the "more options" area of the document setup dialog. I just checked a DVD cover here, and I doubt it's possible to print on 8.5 x 11 paper and get the crops to show, and maybe not even the full bleed area, on most printers.

[Karen Farrell]

Peter,

Thank you for the help. I will set it up that way and at least part of the bleed marks will print, making it easier to do the other two by hand. Also, now I know how to set up the page for other print jobs. I actually did have it set up with the final trim size the first time (but without the bleed because I hadn't gotten that far yet).

Thank you again for your help. I know my way backwards and forwards through Dreamweaver and Framemaker, but the rest of CS5 is like a foreign language to me.

Thanks again!
Karen

P.S. And I think you're right--I might have had Scale to Fit set in the print dialog box. That was something even I should have snapped to! (But after working on this Christmas-present project for three-and-a-half days, I was at wit's end!)

BTW, in the end it came out almost perfect. The spine was just slightly off after cutting, but I was done after much wasted draft and photo paper and many hours of work! It was for my daughter, so I can still redo it.