How do you add crop/cut marks in Indesign CS4

[A***@adobeforums.com]

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

[j***@adobeforums.com]

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 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 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 visible for the printer. Then make a final production PDF (ask your printer!) with that same layer set to invisible.

[A***@adobeforums.com]

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

[j***@adobeforums.com]

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.)

[A***@adobeforums.com]

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