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Quark 6.52 Crop marked PDFs

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2008-10-07 19:42:17
Lotro
Registered: Oct 7 2008
Posts: 5

I can't figure this one out.

I need PDFs from Quark 6.52 with some printer marks. I have a 200+ pg magazine that I need to prepare for press.

Problem is printing postscript with printer marks from Quark is too time consuming. I'd rather "Save Page as EPS" - hot folder it and add the crop marks afterwards, but I'm having trouble automating that.

I've been able to batch process resizing the page to include space for crop marks, but when I try to add printer marks using acrobat, it doesn't work. I've tried some of the out of the box actions from Pitstop, but I can't get that to work either.

Anyone have any success making PDFs from Quark this way?

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2008-10-09 12:42:29
#1
[email protected]
ExpertTeam
Registered: Sep 24 2005
Posts: 252
Hi Lotro,

Firstly, in my opinion it's good to see you're going down the route of using Acrobat Distiller to create PDFs from Quark - this is much safer than using the built-in PDF export feature.

If you save as EPS (unless you have a third-party Xtension) will save each page separately 0 is this what you want? When you print to postscript you can indeed create a multi-page postscript file and in turn, a multi-page PDF file WITH the registration marks built in. Tell me more about this since this method of producing PDFs (with Distiller) is used by 99.9999% of people.

On the crop box/printer marks option in Acrobat, what is happening? Are they not appearing? Are you ensuring the trim, bleed and art boxes are correctly configured?

Enfocus Pitstop default actions work, just remember to de-crop them afterwards (set the crop box to the media box).

Let us know how you get on, keen to help.

Take care,

Jon

I've been using Acrobat since v1.0 and still get amazed by its power. An Acrobat ACE since 1999

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2008-10-09 13:27:23
#2
Lotro
Registered: Oct 7 2008
Posts: 5
Hey Jon, thanks for your input.

I'm avoiding printing a postscript because it eats up too much of my processor time. I have a 208 page magazine and printing that postscript file (even in chunks) takes too long. I'd like to be able to save the EPS files and then hot folder them elsewhere for processing.

The batch command to add printer marks appeared to be failing b/c it gives an error message indicating that the marks may overlap artwork. Since it's a batch command, there's no opportunity to hit "okay" so it just fails.

I ended up getting Pitstop to work, but I spent a lot of time learning exactly what crop, trim and bleed sizes I wanted and how to specify them properly. The default action in Pitstop makes the crop box way too large to send to the printer.

In hindsight, I probably need to setup the original Quark document to be larger than my image size and just place the crop marks etc. live on those pages, then when I save as EPS they'll be fine to distill as is and just have marks.

At any rate, I've got it to work now, but not by using Acrobat to batch process - that error message causes the process to fail.

Chris
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