We were recently alerted to a “practice question” on the Adobe ACE Exam Guide that Adobe published a few months ago which seems very confusing, even to the point of offering the wrong correct answer. The question is:
You want InDesign to alert you if your art is not bleeding off the page properly according to your print provider’s specifications. What should you do?
A. You enter the correct Bleed size by choosing File > Document Setup.
B. You create an Adobe PDF Preset that has Use Document Bleed Settings selected.
C. In a custom preflight profile, you select the Bleed and Slug Setup checkbox. You then select the Bleed Size Must Be checkbox and enter the desired distance from the page edge.
D. In a custom preflight profile, you select the Bleed and Slug Setup checkbox, the Bleed Size Must Be checkbox, and the Bleed/Trim Hazard checkbox. You then enter the desired distances from the page edge
Adobe insists that the answer is D. But several people have pointed out that they cannot find Bleed/Trim Hazard in the Preflight Profiles dialog box and it seems as though C is the correct answer.
As James Wamser helpfully pointed out in our earlier blog post: Bleed/Trim Hazard is actually there… it’s just under the Images and Objects category, rather than the Document category (where Bleed and Slug Setup is). The explanation is that the latter checks the document setup itself, while the former checks objects inside the document (to ensure they are bleeding properly).
So let’s say the document is set up with the proper bleed amount, but the objects don’t bleed far enough off the page. Turning on the Bleed and Slug Setup checkbox would give you No Errors. You must turn on Bleed/Trim Hazard in order to get the error correctly.
There’s no doubt that is a tricky question! But from my reading of it, it is a fair one.
Good luck all ACE exam testers!
(I know you’ve heard this before, but we will be releasing an ebook from Mike Rankin on the topic of how to study for the ACE exam very soon. It’s being edited now, and should be out in another few weeks!)
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 16, 2009
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