Sometimes stupid software bugs just burn my bu**.

For one of my clients, I designed a 8.5×11″ flyer that’s going to a real printer. It’s a full-bleed piece, so the printer requested that I give them an eighth-inch bleed, with trim marks. I thought, “Oh. No worries. I’m using my brand-spanking-new-hot-off-the-presses copy of CS3, which will surely be able to handle this sort of thing. Well, you can see where this is going — it doesn’t. If you make an 8.5×11″ documentin Illustrator CS3, and then save it as a PDF with the appropriate bleed size and trim marks, you don’t get what you wanted. Illustrator crops the document at the artboard limits, which are 8.5×11″.

Some quick googling turned up a discussion of the problem, but not the solution I wanted.

But there is a work-around. I’ll give you a hint: it doesn’t involve CS3’s new crop area tool.

If you use the crop area tool, you get the same bug, so it’s no help.

The solution:

1. Add ¼” of width all the way around the artboard, making your document 9×11.5″
2. Save the document as a PDF
3. Open the new PDF in Acrobat 8
4. Go to Document > Crop Pages…
5. Set the TrimBox (shown below) to ¼” all the way around — to compensate for the ¼” we added before. You’ll see the bright green line in the preview window that now delineates the original 8.5×11″ document size.

   

6. Go to Advanced > Print Production > Add Printers Marks
7. Check “Trim Marks”

You should now see the trim marks! Don’t forget to save…