Creating Custom Printer Marks in InDesign
June 28th, 2007M. asked:
Can I customize the crop marks and registration marks that InDesign creates?
I never thought you could until Olav Martin Kvern, my co-author on Real World InDesign discovered a secret method using PMD (also known as .mrk) files. It’s obscure, it’s not necessarily for the faint of heart, but it’s not that hard and it’s very powerful.
For example, you could make an .mrk file that places the page information on the page instead of outside the trim area. This might be helpful if you were printing a Letter sized page on Letter sized paper and didn’t have room for the crop marks and page info.
Ole and I wrote up the MRK file definition in Real World InDesign, but we’ve decided to post that section here as a PDF file for everyone to enjoy.
The PDF file includes several examples, including some source code that you can download from here. For example, there’s a mrk file that makes InDesign’s printer marks look very similar to those found in QuarkXPress.
The description includes a list of customization codes and explanations for how to type them in an MRK file, including detailed illustrations such as this one:
Obviously, if you like this kind of InDepth information, we hope you’ll go ahead and buy the whole book itself.
By the way, I know someone here is going to say, “Dude! Where’s the CS3 version of the book?” Well, we’re working on it as fast as our fingers can go. It should be out in another couple of months. You can order a prerelease version at Amazon.com and be the first in your neighborhood to get it!
David (and Ole) thanks so much for making that PDF available!
But it took me for-EV-er to find the button that would let me downoad it. Could you make it a little bigger?
:)
Jumping jackrabbits, Batman, this should have been the “Obscure Feature of the Year… ear… ear…” in Episode 52. Thanks for posting the PDF. I had no idea you could do this.
Hi guys
Is there a way to customize the way ID’s page information slug is formatted (6 pt, lower left corner) by default?
Thanks as always-
Skip Baker
Newcombe: Did you download and read the PDF? You can make your own custom mark, including changing the size and position of the page info slug. To make this the default, you need to change the default printer preset.
This is very useful! Thanks so much for sharing.
I am creating a PMD according to the directions, but I wonder if there is a way to NOT define an element (color bar, for example) and have the default show. I find when printing all marks using a PMD with an undefined element, it does not print that element even if all printer’s marks are checked in the print dialog. (also, I figured I could copy from the default PMD and paste into my own, but I cannot find any default .mrk files. ) I guess my question is: how can I get a copy of the default.mrk? Thanks so much!!
Hi, This is great. I wish i’d known about this before a previous project of ours. We met a lot of issues regrading printers marks that dont match the source file. Our team got in trouble because of that simple thing. Anyhow, Is there a way to change the font of the page information? Say I want it to display courier, exactly how quark displays it?
Karoldev, I believe it normally does use Courier, no? There is a sample in that PDF (or at least in Real World InDesign CS2) that shows how to make a QuarkXPress style of printer marks.
Very cool, thanks. Has anyone found a way to get the CMYKTextColor parameter to work for the slug text? I tried entering ” CMYKTextColor [0 1 0 0]” for magenta, along with other variations, but no love.
Is there a PrintSpt folder for CS3? We’re migrating and would like to keep our *.mrk files from CS2 to use for InDesign CS3.
MHong, yes this appears to work in CS3, too.
Does anything allow you to alter where InDesign decides to cut off the page information on the right side? Our files have long names due to job numbers, descriptors, size info, version numbers, etc., and the name is always cut off. This makes it difficult for our AEs to keep different printouts separate from each other. With Quark we never had that problem. Thanks for your help!
Alan, the “cut off” is based on the bleed amount. Perhaps you just need to increase the bleed value on the right side?
Thank you soooo much. All I wanted to do was to control the length of the crop marks. This simple solution has alluded me for a long time.
I managed to get the plate colors to not print on top of each other, however the pantone names do not show up, only cmyk. They do show up if I print separations, but I need to export composite pdf’s. Any help with this is appreciated.
David, thanks for replying. Perhaps I wasn’t clear in explaining my problem, but just in case I attempted several different bleed settings, to no effect. The name still cuts off after 32 characters, with “1 1″ added at the end, presumably to indicate section and page numbers. The name never so much as crosses the center of the document, much less gets close to the right side bleed. Thanks for your help.
The name cuts off after 32 characters, with “1 1″ How to define the “PubName” length? is there any options… Kindly need your help. Thanks in advance.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have any good suggestions for you. It sounds like a limitation of ID. Perhaps they’ll remove that in a future version. In the meantime, you might want to use variables and slug area to handle that data.
All I want to do is change the font for the page information from Times New Roman to Helvetica. Can I do that?