[Scribus] Re: Crop mark

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Asif,

> All of it flew past over my head!  I don't understand anything about
> crop marks.  Would you elaborate more on it please?  Further, what is
> "Bleeding" stuff?  Just out of learning and curiosity.


all these features are necessary for professional printing, which is 
quite different from printing on your inkjet.
In most professional printing processes, content is printed on larger 
sheet than the page with the content. To get the best results and to get 
around some inaccuracies of printing machines, lots of different marks 
need to be printed on these sheet, which have nothing to with content:

1) Crop marks: Since the sheets are larger than the intended page size, 
they need to be cut (cropped) after printing. Crop marks tell the 
printer exactly where to cut.

2) Centre marks/fold marks: In most cases, the printed sheets will be 
folded, and the printer needs to know exactly where.

3) Registration marks: These marks allow the printer to control if the 
content has been placed accurately on both sides of a sheet.

Other things might also need to be printed, such as a colour scale, a 
densitometer scale or backup registration. All these things are 
neccessary for the highest degree of control in the printing process.

As for bleed, this has also to do with little inaccuracies of printing 
machines. Imagine you want to have a photo on a page that is to end 
exactly at the page margin. For that reason, you add additional space 
(mostly defined by the printer) and drag the photo a bit over the "real" 
page margin. That way, you can be sure that the photo really ends at the 
page margin and there is no white space left, due to inaccuracies of 
printing machines. Most professional graphics and layout programmes have 
a "bleed" function that lets you enter the values required by the 
printer. Scribus doesn't have this feature yet, so you need to follow 
Louis' advice on the Wiki.

HTH,

Christoph