Re: crop marks in PDF for printing

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2016-11-03 17:22, Federico Bruni wrote:
> Hi folks
>
> I have a urgent request.
> Tomorrow morning I need to print a book and I've just been asked to add
> "crop marks" (I think this is the right expression) to the final PDF.
> IIUC crop marks are not needed when printing with normal printers, but
> it's needed for serious digital and offset printing machines.
> [...]
> I guess that I'll have to use some external applications.
> Can anybody give me a hint?

You can use some external application to create an empty one-page PDF 
with only the crop marks and use, e.g., pdftk with its "stamp" or 
"background" function to overlay the book and the crop marks. If you 
need to increase the paper size of your Lilypond output and don't want 
to modify the source, pdfjam with options --noautoscale true --papersize 
'{21cm,29.7cm}' is your friend.

For creating the crop marks: Inkscape will do if you want to design them 
yourself (or got a template from the print shop). Otherwise, I recommend 
to use Scribus; it offers several printer marks (crop, bleed, 
registration, color bars) on its Pre-Press tab on PDF export. Just 
create a new doc, adjust page size, export, done.


Cheers,
Alexander