[reportlab-users] What are cropMarks

[Mike Driscoll]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out what all the arguments to the Canvas object do and noticed that there is a cropMarks argument. The docstring says the following:

cropMarks may be True/False or an object with parameters borderWidth, markColor, markWidth       and markLength

What kind of object can be passed? Are the cropMarks supposed to tell the developer where the PDF might be cropped when printed? Are they showing the border of the document?

Thanks,

Mike

-----------------
Mike Driscoll

Blog:   http://blog.pythonlibrary.org

Books: Python 101, Python 201: Intermediate Python 

[Constantine]

Crop marks are used by printing house to understand where to crop page. Content might be placed outside page for various reasons so printing houses should be notified where page ends by pdf producer using crop marks.

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[Andy Robinson]

On 20 April 2017 at 14:27, Mike Driscoll <mi...@pythonlibrary.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to figure out what all the arguments to the Canvas object do and
> noticed that there is a cropMarks argument. The docstring says the
> following:
>
> cropMarks may be True/False or an object with parameters borderWidth,
> markColor, markWidth and markLength

Going from memory, if you set this to True, we will make the page 3mm
larger than declared and draw some crop marks on the corners. Turn it
on and see!

This is done because commonly you might want a web and a print version
of the same document. The web version might be exactly A4 or US
Letter sized, but the printer wants a bigger page with 3mm bleed
around the edge so they can "cut" it. It would be very tedious to
have to change the x and y coordinates of everything in the document.
So, a web form might have a checkbox saying "is it for print or web?"
and this does most of the work.

The object was added later and allows further customisation.

Look in the RML User's Guide for some more explanation, but the
feature is the same.

- Andy
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[Mike Driscoll]

Thank you Andy and Constantine. Your explanations helped a lot!

Mike