Quark Forums

I do magazine ad production, and many advertisers send us ad files in PDF format.

Why is it that crop lines show up on some PDF files when imported into a Quark document, but not on others?

I'm frustrated because the crop marks are in the bleed area, and I'm afraid they'll show up on the printed page.

The ads are both built to the same dimensions, and when opened in Acrobat, appear to have the crop marks in the same place.

But when I import them into Quark files, the crop marks appear in one and not the other.

 Am I missing something?

 Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Hi Paris,

Go to  File > Import.
Highlight the PDF you want to import.
In the Import dialog, Click on the PDF tab of the Import dialog.
In the the Bounding Box to Use popup menu, select Bleedbox/CropBox.
Click Open.

Note: You can also select Mediabox, CropBox, and TrimBox while importing the PDF

I hope this information helps

Thanks, but I'm already importing them with Bleedbox selected.

I think the problem is that the crop marks appear inside the bleed area, instead of just outside of it. They actually butt up agains the trim lines.

Does this mean the file was built incorrectly? If so, what do I have to tell the designer to do differently?

Hi Paris,

Please advise your advertisers to make sure that the crop offset is equal to or greater than the bleed set on the PDF.

I hope this information helps

 

Which brings up an interesting question...why in the world is Quark's default offset smaller (0.083") than the industry standard bleed setting of 0.125"? Unless someone knows to go in and change this setting - and judging by the files I get, very few people do - you end up with crop marks inside the bleed area by default.

We do the same sort of publishing here... When I choose "MediaBox" at the bottom of my Get Picture panel, that always gets all the crops and bleeds into my Quark box. Good Luck!

 ampeg66,

 

I am not sure of the reasons as they have been like that for as long as I have used XPress (3.31 I think).  However they are now "fixed" with a default offset of .125" in XPress 8.  It can be set in the print styles/PDF output styles in 7.x, but by default it is set to .083". 

Actually, I find this feature hugely annoying... I work for a newspaper and receive quite a few camera-ready ads which are sent to me with crop marks. I open them in acrobat, crop them and save the PDF. It urks me that I have to then select to bring the PDF in with the Crop Marks setting. I place hundreds of ads a day and it gets tiresome to have to do that. Just venting, but I do with that importing using the crop mark setting was the default

This should absolutely be a preference setting, because one size clearly does not fit all (I almost always use Media Box, never the Crop Marks setting, and absolutely NEVER use the default Trim Box setting). But I agree that it's annoying that you can't set it to your most commonly used setting, then forget it. Maybe this has changed in version 8?

However, once I've made a particular setting when importing a PDF in Quark 7, it remembers it (until the next time I restart Quark, where I have to set it again). But you have to set it every single time you import?