[scribus] Bleed & crop marks

[Gregory Pittman]

On 12/24/2010 12:04 AM, Yves Le Seigle wrote:
> First of all, a big thank you to all the dev team for this astonishing software. Wow, a Website redesign!
>
> Scribus 1.3.9 (C-C-T-F-C1.10.0), Ghostscript 8.71, Ubuntu 10.10 Français.
>
> I'm working on a collective project. My part is Scribusing (?) the document. It's a recto/verso, wide postal card, with tree horizontal rows. Here is a quick view of the recto:
>
> Row 1 : photos
> Row 2 : text with a red background
> Row 3 : photos
>
> The printer ask for bleed and crop marks. Not much information is available for these topics on Wiki/doc. I know it's on pro level but I have to go trough this and learn too.
>
> *** Bleed: I know what it is. What I don't get is how to set it up. Do I have to set it at the document creation (a kind of margin)? Or do I have to enlarge photos to overflow the document size (for cutting, that is)?
>
The bleed as a setting refers to an enlargement of your document page by 
the amount of bleed. The correct placement of your photos is your 
responsibility -- what this means typically is that you want your photos 
to overlap the edge (of your original page) so that they extend into the 
bleed area. How much you want to do this is up to you, and may depend on 
the content.

It's also worth mentioning that if you have a photo in a double-sided 
layout which overlaps the "crease", you will not lose any part of the 
photo, since each adjoining page will "borrow" a bit from the other for 
the bleed area.

> *** Crop marks: It's set at PDF creation but there is no control over it, as far as I can see. Can I set it manually? It seam to me that it's base on margins, is it correct? If I need more crop marks than the four corners, how to add more?

The crop marks are determined by the bleed, and should be at the edges 
of the original document size, in other words, your final cut size. 
Printers don't always want crop marks, so it's good that you know this 
for sure.

The good news is that you're using 1.3.9, so this is all done at PDF 
export, and doesn't need the Bleed script as 1.3.3.x did.

Greg