[OS X TeX] [Slightly OT] Crop marks over a full page image

[David Watson]

Well, to be honest, I never talked with a specialist who could give me some guidance.
This is the printing services for the University that I work for, and I can tell from the samples and the books that they prepare for professors that use their services that everything is very professional - once it gets to the hands of the ones doing the work.

This is the first time I've ever designed something intended for a destination other than a laser printer.
I wasn't aware of the need for a "bleed" before now, while I did realize that professional printers use a larger stock and then trim it down.
I remember seeing the CMYK "targets" when I was young after what I suppose was a dump-truck malfunction, but I never knew what they were for.

On their website, they specify "especially for students" that they can do a maximum of 18.5x12.5 posters, including bleed and registration marks.
I was asked this morning to provide bleed, after the cover page (which I had "printed" to pdf using Adobe CS4 with a "bleed" of 0.125 inches, as they asked...) spit the dummy.

They recommended that I use a page size of 11.25 by 8.75 and run the image to the edge.

Looking more closely at some of the other pages on their website, it appears that they use 13x19 inch stock in their duplexing color digital imager, so I assume that a page size of 13.0x9.5 will allow for two logical pages to be printed side-by-side, while affording me enough room for the trim marks, registration marks, and bleed.
Hopefully this will bring down the estimate for the production run.

I think the limiting factor here is that the semester just ended, and perhaps the staff who would normally guide neophytes in the proper direction are taking a well deserved vacation.

The representative I talked to at the front desk had a huge "?" above her head when I mentioned that I was using GIMP and LaTeX.

I hope she wasn't imagining a particularly disturbing scene from Pulp Fiction.

On May 14, 2010, at 10:41 PM, Alan T Litchfield wrote:

> 
> On 15/05/2010, at 2:15 PM, David Watson wrote:
> 
>> FWIW, I think I'm going to go with a wider stock paper size and see what they have to say.
> 
> 
> Changing the paper size certainly will mess things up. You have the page box, trim box, and crop box. Each of these extends the page margins by a set amount.
> 
> Alan
> 
> --
> Alan T Litchfield
> AlphaByte
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