InDesign & Illustrator Exporting as PDF as different sizes

[Cassie_UP]

Hello,

I've been using InDesign and Illustrator files interchangably, and I noticed that when I export the files to PDFs, the document sizes come out differently. (Illustrator: 6.92x3.67in VS InDesign: 6.58x3.33in)

The original document sizes, bleeds, and crops are all the same.

I've attached some images to explain what I mean.

Does anyone know why this happens/am I missing something?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

My first thought, based on a lot of questions along these lines, is the bleed and crop settings. While you can set them the same in most of the Adobe apps, there are some variations in how each app applies the elements and spacing around them.

The first question is this: is the document as marked by the crop marks the same size in each case? Is all the difference simply in the "print border" containing crop marks, bleed marks, bleed, etc.? That should make no difference in the end, as all a printer cares about is the final trim size and having all the marks and adequate bleed to work with. If there's variations in how each page or doc has space around it... it should be pretty much irrelevant.

[Cassie_UP]

Hi James,

Thanks for responding.

I didn't realize that each of the apps had their own variations with crops and bleeds.

The original document sizes are the same in both Illustrator and InDesign, as show in the attachments, 6x2.75in.

As for printing, while it is true that the printer will print both versions so long as it has enough space for crops and bleeds, I had to reupload the files for imposition because they were not the same size.

I ended up bringing the Illustrator file into InDesign and then reexporting the files separtately.

I thought that I could keep the art file and the data merge file as two separate entities, but didn't know that each app calculates differently. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

As much as the Creative set is an integrated tool — and I well remember the days of laboriously exporting-and-importing files between the various apps — they are also tools with different purposes, histories, 'engines' and development. ID in particular is a fairly old app internally and different from Illustrator and Photoshop in some key ways.

Another alternative might be to open the export files in Acrobat and crop the slightly larger ones to the smaller size; as long as the crops line up from page to page, that should avoid any errors from the printer.