Quark Forums

When we're outputting to PDF from quark 9 some users in our studio are finding their PDFs are not cropped to the registration marks even though their presets are the same. This results in the final PDFs being slightly different sizes.

Are you using PDF TrimBoxes for position, or relying on offsets or centres?

Trimbox defined by the layout properties including centred registration marks. It's fine in quark 8 on all the machines but with the same settings it's wrong on 3 machines in our studio.

Can you explain in a bit more detail, I think you are saying that the PDF Trimbox on a PDF Exported from Quark9 doesn't sit in position to the Registration Marks drawn on the PDF. Or are you saying placed content in quark is shifting when Exporting to PDF? Also are you Exporting or Printing, JAWS or Distiller/

Exporting straight to a high quality PDF. Content isn't shifting, the page size of the PDF varies in size because they have a 1-1.5 mm white border round the whole document.

Exporting should always give you a PDF Trimbox. This would be used by a modern impostion program to position a PDF, it wouldn't matter if there was extra space beyond this, If you can work out how much is being added by quark9 then reduce the Registration Line length accordingly it may come back in at the same offsets.

I appreciate this but we're all running the same version of quark on the same mac OS and getting different sizes which output fine in quark 8.

Only thing I can come up with to try, would be to Edit your Output styles create a new PDF Output style on one mac then Import it into one of the other ones.

Already done this doesn't work all output styles are identical.

Is there a difference in OSX System Prefs > Print and Fax> default Printer settings for the macs? ...Grasping at straws now :(

The machines are all set up the same.

I experienced the same issue. We use 5 mm bleed and 5 mm cropmarks length and on some machines PDF output was approx. 1.3 mm larger all around the page. This used to happen on QuarkXPress 8 and 7 also. My solution was to copy xpress.prefs from machine that produced the right PDFs cropped to the end of cropmarks (1cm around the page). I can't imagine how to solve this problem if you don't have at least one machine that produces right PDFs. Can someone from Quark help? I remember on version 7 there was a special cookie you could enter to repair this problem.

Tried it on two machines so far so good, but still doesn't explain which preference file is causing it?? Also we replaced the whole Quark 9 preference folder not just the xpress.prefs as just that file didn't work.

My guess would be the one that holds the Output Styles is getting corrupt.

In my case modifying or copying Output Styles prefs file didn't change anything. Only copying XPress Preferences.prf file from the Mac that produced right PDFs did the trick.