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 6x9 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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