While putting the gathered thoughts on the Wiki, it occurred to me that the crop mark area is only really relevant if you do have crop marks. They have to come from somewhere. You can paint them using SVG in a fixed positioned block-container with negative top/left coordinates. However, such an SVG will always be designed for a particular page size. I think it would be easy to offer a plug-in interface for programmatically painting the crop marks (and color samples etc.). Get a Graphics2D plus information about the page size and what else is necessary and some code could paint crop marks for any page size.
We could even go so far and not offer the fox:crop-offset extension at all and let the crop marks plug-in tell the renderer how big that area should be. That would also solve the naming closeness (although I personally don't find that too troublesome if it's properly documented). I don't need crop marks myself (just the bleed area) but it has been a topic every now. And everyone had to paint their own crop marks in some way. To make it super-flexible, we could define an extension that triggers the crop-mark painting. Each crop mark plug-in could have a name and possibly even parameters for customization. For example: <fo:declarations> <fox:crop-marks style="mysimple1" color-bars="gray"/> </fo:declarations> However, crop marks are often coupled with imposition features. The crop marks are different, for example, if you do a 2-up. So the above would only cover cases with no imposition. Just brainstorming.... Jeremias Maerki
