Printer mark "types" in English version

[OsakaWebbie]

As an American who lives in Japan, I used the Japanese version of InDesign and other Adobe software for many years, but now that I subscribe to CC I enjoy the luxury of being able to install either language version as desired. There are a few Japan-specific features not in the English version, most notably vertical writing. But as long as I don't need those features, it's easier to navigate the interface in English.

But today a large print job had printer marks showing on the edges of many of the pages, and the printshop people and I discovered that the PDF export functionality in the English version of InDesign does not have the same types of printer marks.

In the Japanese version, there are three choices of "Type" in the Marks section of the Marks and Bleeds tab. See this screenshot, where I'm showing the selection dropdown open, and translated the choices below. ("Center mark" is apparently "registration mark" in English.)

But if you look at the English version, you'll see that there is only one choice for Type: "Default". I don't know if you've ever wondered why a dropdown even exists if there is only one choice, but now you know - there are more choices in some language versions.

What is the difference, you ask? See here a demonstration of the three. The lighter blue area is the 3mm bleed, and you can see that in the Western style of marks ("Default" in the English version), the crop marks and registration marks encroach on the bleed area. What's the point of having a bleed to protect against cutting misalignment if printer marks are going to be printed within them? It doesn't make sense to me, nor did it to the printshop.

The printshop was extremely kind to me - they are reprinting my large print job at no cost, even though it wasn't their fault. But what should I do in the future? Ideally it would be nice to have those printer mark type choices in the English version - is it possible to somehow import them? If not, is it possible to have both languages of the same CC version installed? So far I haven't been able to do that - currently I have English CC2018 and Japanese CC2017, but if I do my layout in the English version, I'll need the same or newer version in Japanese to create the PDF. So if I can't have 2018 in both languages, I'll need to reverse the order and have Japanese always be one version newer rather than older. Or does someone have other ideas of how to solve this without wrecking my workflow too badly? (I'm also curious if someone can explain why the "Western" mark style is not a problem in Western printshops - this baffles me.)

[vladan saveljic · Accepted solution]

apart the choices of "Type" in the Marks section I would tell you about this

OsakaWebbie  ha scritto

The lighter blue area is the 3mm bleed, and you can see that in the Western style of marks ("Default" in the English version), the crop marks and registration marks encroach on the bleed area. What's the point of having a bleed to protect against cutting misalignment if printer marks are going to be printed within them? It doesn't make sense to me, nor did it to the printshop.

Set the value offset bigger than bleed value

In this example the bleed is 3 mm and offset 4 mm

and the result in pdf will be:

[OsakaWebbie]

Wow, I never noticed that "Offset" field before, or if I did, I didn't know what it meant. Laubender suggested DIY marks, but I don't have to match the mark style exactly, so that would be more work and would have to be part of the real document, not added only when needed. I love the simplicity of Vladan's suggestion of just setting an offset! I don't need it to be bigger than the bleed value - just equal to the bleed looks fine.

Responding to Laubender's comment about no more need for marks, that's not up to me. The printshop (probably the largest online printer in Japan, which has done a great job for me for nine years) has a very specific guide for what settings to use in every version of all software whose output they support, and in InDesign they want the first three categories of marks (called inner, outer, and center in Japanese). Today no one said, "If you're having trouble avoiding the bleed with your marks, just turn them off." Whether the physical machines need them or not, I don't know, but I'm happy to do it their way.

[Laubender]

OsakaWebbie  wrote

… (I'm also curious if someone can explain why the "Western" mark style is not a problem in Western printshops - this baffles me.)

Hi,

it's more than 10 years ago ( maybe even 15 years ) when I needed printer marks for a print job. I'm surprised that your printers require them. Nowadays print jobs do not need printer marks anymore. The PDF boxes for Trim and Bleed that are automatically generated with InDesign's export to PDF are sufficient. Printer marks once were useful and necessary for separated output on film where single pages with multicolor work were arranged for plate copying.

To solve your problem: Do your own marks and position them in the bleed area of the master pages. You could base a master on another master so it should be sufficient to do this only once with a document.

In earlier versions of InDesign it was possible to "hack" printer marks.
But I don't know if that's possible with CC versions. Read about it here:

https://indesignsecrets.com/japanese-and-chinese-crop-marks-for-indesign.php

https://indesignsecrets.com/creating-custom-printer-marks-in-indesign.php

Regards,
Uwe

[Fran_ACh]

This is old, very old post, but if some of you came here to find answers, you can install the japanese version of InDesign with english UI. This is how:

https://ken-lunde.medium.com/adobe-indesign-tips-japanese-cjk-functionality-english-ui-redux-539528e...

[OsakaWebbie]

Thanks - nice tip. (For people like me, Ken Lunde is a hero!) I'm not currently doing a project that needs the Japanese options (so they would just be extra clutter in the UI), but I have in the past and no doubt will again in the future, so I've saved the info.