[XeTeX] Problems with crop package?

[Stefano Franchi]

>
> Crop-marks are not part of the logical contents of a document that you
> write. Logically they might lie outside the scope of what you would
> expect LaTeX to be able to do. Certainly crop marks lie outside the
> normal area of the page that LaTeX controls
> The correct way to think of crop-marks, and color-registration marks,
> etc.  is as a property of the printing process. These are something
> that you request when choosing how to print your job.
>

>
> The  crop.sty  package is a hack that extends the page area, and tries
> to draw such features. This is an approach that works with LaTeX, when 
> it
> can use the full features of PostScript for drawing in arbitrary 
> places.
>

You are absolutely right on both counts---but layout systems take care 
of the printing process too, in a sense. LaTeX/TeX is similar to 
InDesign/Quark in this respect. They can all produce crop marks at 
will. You are nonetheless right that crop marks are outside the page, 
logically speaking. It's probably a good decision to leave them  out of 
XeTeX, as long as other solutions are available.

> However, that is not how XeTeX works, nor other sophisticated software
> like Acrobat Pro and Apple's Print Manager, when they create PDF files.
>
> Did you notice that there is no mention of XeTeX in the LaTeX 
> Companion ?
> It's too new, and has some radical differences, to be in there yet.

I noticed. and I hope it will have a long and satisfying life. The 
management of fonts (in a broad sense, not just typefaces, but glyphs, 
sccripts, etc)  seems to me to be the most important issue that LaTeX 
faces to become a very viable system outside of its traditional 
technical niche. (and too bad for non-Mac users...)

>
>
>> The XeTeX log has a section about geometry and crop that seems normal 
>> (appended below). The console window in TeXShop has the rather 
>> cryptic remark that may or may not be relevant.:
>>
>> [1] [2
>> ### warning on page [1.0]: paper size "433.62pt,650.43pt" will take 
>> effect from NEXT page ] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] 
>> [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
>> [18] [19] [20]
>>
>>
>> Anyway, I hope this helps people who know about these things. I will 
>> be looking into an alternative solution for crop marks.
>
> Presumably you need crop-marks for a printed version only, so there's
> no need for hyperlinking of any sort.
>
> So one way that might work would be to process your document with 
> XeTeX,
> without any thought of crop-marks at all (at this stage).
>
> Next write a 2nd LaTeX job, to be processed with pdfLaTeX, that simply 
> reads
> each page of XeTeX's output, placing it as a graphic image.
> This is something that is very easy to do using the {pdfpages}  
> package.
> Also \usepackage{crop} with this job, to get your crop-marks.
>
> Since you cannot have hyperlinks within imported images, you will lose
> that feature --- but that shouldn't be an issue for a print-job.
>

I might explore that option, thanks for the hint. Although I must say 
the prospect of rerunning a 300-odd pages manuscript twice trhough 
LaTeX (or XeTeX plus LaTeX) to produce final output makes me cringe. 
You keep referring to the crop-mark option in Apple's Print manager, 
BTW, but I could not find any such thing. Unfortunately I do not have 
access to Acrobat Pro to try that one out.

Cheers,

Stefano



__________________________________________________
Stefano Franchi
Department of Philosophy                  Ph:  (64) 9 373-7599 x83940
University Of Auckland			Fax: (64) 9 373-7408
Private Bag 92019				s.franchi at auckland.ac.nz
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