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• • January 15, 2016 at 8:29 am #80802
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    This should be easy but it seems to be impossible.

    I have a 6″x4″ document.
    The background bleeds off the edges by .125″ all the way around.
    Therefore, when I export with these settings, I expect the final PDF to be 6.25″ x 4.25″.

    View post on imgur.com

    Instead, it’s this seemingly random size, 6.42″ x 4.42″.
    Why?

  • January 15, 2016 at 10:08 am #80849
    Kelly Vaughn

    Participant

    It has to do with the crop marks. InDesign crop marks are 0.2083 in long. You have them with a zero offset. 0.2083 in X 2 = roughly 0.42in. Add that to your page size, and that’s where the 6.42 comes from.

  • January 15, 2016 at 11:37 am #80850
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    Gotcha, I appreciate the explanation.

    That’s so annoying and random… why on earth .2083 in the first place?
    It’s an irregular number in both inches and mm.

    And there appears to be no simple way to compensate for this… it doesn’t accept
    a negative offset. So I guess I’ll have to redo my backgrounds to have a full quarter inch
    all the way around, which is complete overkill, just so my document size isn’t a weird number
    that makes the printer’s life harder.

  • January 15, 2016 at 11:55 am #80852
    Kelly Vaughn

    Participant

    One thing to note is that you have your crop marks with a zero offset. So you crop marks will be inside the bleed, rather than outside of the bleed. The purpose of the bleed to give you a little fudge-room, so that when the paper shift ever so slightly during the cutting process, the bleed will account for this paper shift. But with the crop marks inside the bleed area, as you have them above, the crop marks will be exposed slightly when the paper shift during cutting.
    nd on your Printer. If you’re take your PDF to a local mailbox/shipping center in a strip mall, chances are very high they won’t know about these settings in Acrobat. But if you’re going to a real Printer that makes their living printing things, then their staff will know about this and your PDF won’t confuse them at all.

    Can you tell me how you got that screenshot in your post above? I have some screenshots to post, but I don’t know how to get them in here.

  • January 15, 2016 at 12:02 pm #80853
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    One reason for weird measurement: one “point” equals 1/72 of an inch or 0.01388 inches, so 6 points is .0833… etc.

  • January 15, 2016 at 12:41 pm #80854
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    David: ohhh… points, I didn’t even think of that. Thanks.

    Kelly: I couldn’t figure it out either so I just uploaded to an image hosting website, and then directly linked to the image. The image appeared within the post like magic. My guess is any direct link (like https://i.imgur.com/Bh3CAqL.jpg ) will just appear within the post, wheres an indirect link (such as https://imgur.com/Bh3CAqL ) may not. Definitely the forum admins should include a button to upload images, or at least some text informing users that the image will appear in the post if you directly link to it.

    What you’re saying about the crop marks makes sense… I should offset them a bit. So I guess I can just do .125″ bleed, and then add enough offset to keep the cropmarks away from the edges, which will also allow me to make my PDF size an even number (which maybe the printer doesn’t care about, but it drives me bonkers).

  • January 15, 2016 at 12:55 pm #80857
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    Thanks again for the help guys… an offset of 0.0417 in got me a reasonable 6.5″ x 4.5″ output size, with crop marks that are a hair away from the edges (not much, but even a millimeter of wiggle room will help, and the crop marks themselves are microscopic anyway).

    Cheers.

  • January 15, 2016 at 1:00 pm #80858
    Kelly Vaughn

    Participant

    Here are the “Set Page Boxes” I was talking about for Acrobat.

    https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uHf6WekyLZE/Vpk_YKLZNCI/AAAAAAAAAXk/SVJBZ7u1lyY/s1600/TrimBox.png
    https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nYkL1Mlilfs/Vpk_YOaf5bI/AAAAAAAAAXo/n1hheb_TFdQ/s1600/CropBox.png
    https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k-G8qHSl9Cw/Vpk_YDbDATI/AAAAAAAAAXs/AfESL4OKCBo/s1600/BleedBox.png

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