Japanese and Chinese Crop Marks for InDesign

David Blatner

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I’m about to head off to The InDesign Conference in Tokyo, which should be a wild trip. And just in time, I received an email from a reader who found inspiration from my post on creating custom print marks. Dorothy Lindman at Uniden wrote:

Thank you very much for your article on custom printer marks in InDesign. This has been an ongoing issue with our Japanese and Chinese printers for at least 2 years now. They have been asking us to use the same style of marks that Illustrator and Framemaker do, which was not possible before now.

I used your information and the sample.mrk file to create “look-alike” mrk files for the “Japanese” style crop marks used by Illustrator and the “Tombo” style crop marks used by Framemaker. It took quite a bit of work, and they’re not 100% perfect (for example, Framemaker uses a “concentric circle” registration mark that I can’t replicate), but it’s much, much closer to the requested marks than the standard InDesign style.

This was very happy news, but then she followed with an even better kicker: She’s letting me post her mrk files so that anyone can use them!

(Note that the Japanese and Chinese versions of InDesign already let you create these kinds of printer marks; but if you use the regular, non-CJK version of InDesign and you’re printing documents in Asia, you might find these useful.)

You can download the file (which includes sample PDF files) here:

After you unzip the file, put the two .mrk files inside the PrintSpt folder. The location of that folder varies, so just do a search on your hard drive for “PrintSpt” and you’ll find it. Next time you print or export PDF from InDesign, you’ll find these new options in the Type pop-up menu, in the Marks and Bleed pane of the Print dialog box or Export PDF dialog box.

Thank you, Dorothy!