Is it possible to have the prince-bleed property turned on, even without marks? A lot of online printers (lulu.com for example) recommend we don't use marks for printing.

Also, how is the bleed size calculated using the prince-bleed? It seems to me the sizing of the paper increases much more than what I intended when I tried using prince-bleed.

Edited 27 Oct 2013 by felipellrocha

At the moment the bleed area is only available when crop or cross marks are enabled. There is also the trim area controlled by the prince-trim property, which will be adding to the size.

prince-trim and prince-bleed seem to be acting differently in Prince 9, at least compared to Prince 7.

For example, with the following CSS:

prince-trim: 15pt;
prince-bleed: 30pt;
marks: crop cross;

In both cases the PDF will extend 30 + 15 = 45pt beyond the page boundary. But in Prince 7 the crop marks do not extend into the bleed area, and so are 15pt in length. In Prince 9, the crop marks extend to within 6pt of the page boundary, and so are 39pt long. Prince 7's behaviour in this case was acceptable to our printers, but the Prince 9 behaviour is not.

Most of the large commercial printers we work with do not want the crop marks to extend into the bleed area. A common setting is to have the "marks offset," which is the distance from the page boundary to the crop mark, to be 30pt while the bleed is only 13.5pt. This property is adjustable in most page layout programs like InDesign or Quark.

We need to be able to control the marks offset, as the required value ranges from 9pt to 30pt in our experience. So I'd prefer that the bleed amount not influence the placement of the crop marks. The mark offset would become a property, which in conjunction with bleed and trim would give us a lot of flexibility.

Thanks,

Dave

We hear and obey!

In the next maintenance release of Prince 9 we are adding "auto" values to prince-bleed and prince-trim, and allowing them to be set independently of crop/cross marks. We will also add a prince-marks-offset property, which controls the distance of the marks from the trim box.

The only remaining question is how long should the crop marks be? Even if we add a property to control this (overkill perhaps?) we would still need a sensible default length for it.

Hi Mike,

Most crop marks I've seen are 24pt long, which is also quite close to the AH default of 10mm.

I'll email you the full proposal I've sent to the CSS WG.

Thanks!

Dave

Today we have released Prince 9 rev 4, which supports "auto" values on prince-bleed and prince-trim, improved default crop mark positioning, and two new properties: prince-mark-length and prince-mark-offset that offer control over crop marks.