Web Design   Web Hosting   Photoshop Tutorials   Free Fonts   Drawing Basics  
 
Photoshop Tutorials - Free Fonts
[Home]
[Sitemap]
[Blog]
[Read Me First!]
[Photoshop Tutorials]
[Canvas Tutorials]
[Corel Tutorials]
[Quark Tutorials]
[Illustrator Tutorials]
[FreeHand Tutorials]
[Drawing Basics]
[Porting Files]
[Free Fonts]
[Font Tutorials]
[Misc Tutorials]
[Animation]
[About Mike]
[Gallery]
[Related Sites]

 
    Intermediate  
 
  Quick Crop Marks For Adobe® InDesign®
Layouts - Part One

Most page layout programs support the printing of page marks (crop marks and registration marks) when outputting documents to print. Sometimes, though, you will want the page marks to be on the layout itself - such as when preparing 2-up layouts or when ganging-up layouts on a single page. It is common to gang-up several business cards in a single layout. You can get 8 business cards in a single letter-sized piece of film this way, which can save a lot of money on film.

Although ganging-up layouts will save money on film, drawing all those crop marks can be time consuming. This tutorial takes advantage of InDesign's ability to import editable vector objects in order to save time.

InDesign supports the pasting of vector objects from the clipboard and the exporting of layouts to Acrobat® PDF format. When exporting layouts to PDF, you can specify that they include page marks. This tutorial takes advantage of the fact that the PDF file containing the page marks can be opened in Illustrator® where they can be copied, then pasted back into InDesign as editable vector objects.

1. To begin, launch InDesign and open the layout to which you want to add crop marks.

2. Click File > Export. In the Export dialog, choose "Adobe PDF" from the "Formats" pull down in the Mac® or "Save as type" pull down in Windows®. Give the file a name and click "Save". You will see the "Export" dialog next. Click through to the "Pages and Page Marks" dialog, and enter 9 points in the "Offset" box. If your layout bleeds off the page, then enter 9 points in the "Bleed" box as well. Click "Export" when done.

3. Load the PDF into Illustrator. Here you will see the layout as well as the page marks.

4. Delete everything except for the page marks.

5. Now marquee-select everything, or click Edit > Select All. Next click Edit > Copy to copy the page marks to the clipboard.

6. Switch back to InDesign and click Edit > Paste. The "Paste" command centers the objects on your layout. You may have to click Object > Ungroup, then select the crop marks, then click Object > Compound Path > Release to be able to select and edit these objects individually.



Click Here To Continue...

 
 

Previous   Home    Contact Mike   Related Sites    Next

Copyright © 1998-2016 Mike Doughty, All Rights Reserved Legal Notices
Page Last Revised: October 26, 2016
Privacy Policy