Tiff to PDF and pre-press (very easy, but difficult for me)

You can rework your files in Acrobat to make them "printer ready", but for sure Indesign produces "printer ready" files without additional work to do.

If you use Microsoft Word for preparing your data files, you will have multiple problems and adding crop marks is only one of them. And it's pretty senseless to add bleed if there is no bleed... And Word does not cope with bleed, so you would need to make your page size bigger and consider that and manage the bleed manually.

Also: crop marks are only visual clues for us humans. Most of my printers do not need them respectively recreate them at their discretion. Some even explicitly ask only for bleed and no crop marks.

To my understanding, crop marks are outside of the bleed area.

Let's forget for a moment the example I gave to you. I have the same problem with Microsoft Word documents ready for printing.

I need to tell Acrobat that the design I import into it is the "trimbox" (the final size of printing job). Then for security reasons I need to tell it the bleedbox (outward margin for cutting) and the mediabox (the "media box" is the size of paper my printing company uses before cutting it to "trim size"). This is how printing companies ask for documents before printing. Unfortunately Adobe Pro doesn't seem to understand this. It takes my document as the "mediabox" and doesn't allow my to tell it to "increase" blank space AROUND the size of the document I import into it.

It seems useless for printing stations. It doesn't matter what app I am using, Acrobat Pro seems not to take it correctly. I don't have InDesign at this moment and I was wondering if Adobe Acrobat Pro XI would do the job...

Let me know if you have any idea.