Hi Elchanan,
I think this is your job... It is hard to say from the distance, but I think there may be two main problems for printing: a) a missing trimbox and b) missing cropmarks. This depends on the output intent and on the agreements with your print shop. a) For printing, we are in touch with 3 print shops, all of them favor PDF/X3 (or X4). I found that FrameMaker 8 does not supply valid PDF/X3 by itself -- even with the matching Distiller profile, if it is used in "default" configuration. Acrobat preflight tells that all necessary "BOXES" are missing (that is mainly the trimbox) and will stop, leaving the PDFs as useless as they were before. The information about cropbox and trimbox may be essential for your print shop. Simply cropping pages in Acrobat does not necessarily add the correct trimbox. It will only change what you see onscreen. To get valid PDFs for print: You can either set box sizes via "pdfmark" information. Or you change your distiller profile: go to Standard, set the Compatibility option to PDF/X3. This will make the options for trimbox and cropbox available - you have to enter the margins of your FM files without/with a suitable bleed. You may have to try out if the result is ok -- hopefully your left/right page setting is still working. (Settings here in the distiller profile will only allow one single value for each size.) Finally you should always use the Acrobat preflight correction to obtain valid PDF/X3 files! b) Cropmarks may also be essential for printing. It may be a problem to supply cropmarks if the real page size and the effective size differ (so much). I guess that FM will always place cropmarks according to the total size = 8.5x11 in. If this is so, the best would be to draw the lines yourself on the master pages of your template or to switch to another template with the correct (final) page size. Some tools like PitStop may be able to put cropmarks on the PDF pages in batch mode. Please also note: CMYK color will always be changed to different values unless you use EPS (first FM version to handle this correctly is FM 10). If exact color is necessary for your prints, the PDFs should be made with FM 10 (or 11). Best regards - Tino H. Haida, Berlin VLM TechSubs: > Greetings everyone, > > I've created a book in FrameMaker, consisting of about 25 Frame files. There > is nothing extraordinary about the book, just chapters, mostly text, a ToC, > an index, and some standard front matter. Using FM 8 on Win 7. > > The book is to be printed in a 6"x9" format. In the Frame template, I used > 8.5 x 11 pages, then set the margins large enough, so that the text, headers, > footers, etc. would all fit perfectly inside a 6.9 page, including the > margins on the 6.9 page. I assumed that a print shop would be able to take > such a PDF file and put it on press on any machine that print shop has. > > Now, the print shop, with which I have no direct contact, apparently says it > can't use that, wants me to convert the book to 6.9 pages. I say > "apparently", because this is a game of telephone, and I actually have no > idea what the print shop actually said. Charming, eh? :) > > 1. Does my assumption, namely, that a print shop should be able to take the > PDF I created and put it up on any reasonable press, make sense? (I ask, > because I need to decide whether I should "fix" this on my nickel or theirs. > If I'm making a reasonable assumption, then theirs; if not, then of course, > mine.) > > 2. If I need to change the page size in FrameMaker and recreate the PDF, am I > better off changing the template and importing it into the existing book > files, or am I better off changing the template and then pasting the content > into the template, one chapter at a time, resaving each file as I go? Or is > there a third, better option? (It's a one-off project, no one is going to pay > to automate anything, whatever is done, will be done manually.) Also, if I > end up doing this, is there something special I need to know WRT Acrobat > settings I would use in FrameMaker? > > Thank you kindly, > > Elchanan
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