Bleed and crop marks

[emmac76594258]

Hi, I am slightly when setting up my pdf for print. I need no explanation of what a bleed and crop mark do in a PDF but for some reason my crop marks seem to sit inside the image, acting as a bleed mark and then when I go to slect bleed marks they act as crop marks sitting on the outside of my bleed! It's so confusing and have no idea why my file is acting in this way! Please see attached images to help explain...

[rob day]

You have Crop Marks, not Bleed Marks checked. The Offset and Bleed amounts are both set to 3mm so the crop marks in the PDF are correct.

[emmac76594258]

Thanks for your reply Rob. What should the offset be set to? Attached Is with the bleed marks selected and the offset 0.083, but still my bleed marks don't seem to sit inside, even though I see on my indesign file all my content is drawn up to the bleed mark line.

[Creamer Training]

I put the crop mark offset to the document's bleed amount.

The PDF:

[rob day]

I’m not seeing the problem. The Offset amount offsets the crop marks not the bleed marks. The crop marks line up with the trim and need to be offset in case the trimming is not accurate. The bleed marks line up with the bleed and will get trimmed off along with the bleed content. If I include both crop and bleed marks:

The green line indicates the trim line, so if the trim is reasonably accurate, both the crop and bleed marks will be removed.

[emmac76594258]

What I'm not understanding is that unlinke yours, where the bleed mark overlaps your work, my bleed mark seems to sit on the outside of the design. When it should sit where the blue marks in the image below are...

[rob day]

You seem to be confusing the terms. The blue marks in your capture would be crop marks, the outside black marks are bleed marks and are in the correct position. In my capture the bleed marks are in the same outside position, and the crop marks are offset and lined up with the trim.

[Jens Trost]

Hi @emmac76594258,
the question is, why do you want the marks there?
From a production standpoint your inital settings and resulting PDF is absolut correct.

If you put the crop marks (not bleed marks!) at the edge of your final format I guarantee you litte bits and pieces of them will show in the final product (if not handled by the printer) due to tolerances during cutting!
And with your design they will even show ugly white borders.

What rob shows, the crop marks inside the bleed, is actually targeted by the offset setting. So you COULD position your crop marks where you want them by setting the offset to 0. But again, DON'T do it!