Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 11/17/2008

Question
QUESTION: I'm working on a mac Leopard 10.5.  I often need to produce pdfs with printer's marks from Illustrator. All of a sudden the output for a full page is just the center of the page. It still works fine for smaller work, e.g. business card size, and for full size with no printer's marks.

My guess is that the driver is corrupted but I can't find a fix or a place to download a new driver. I have tried deleting the current driver (1.1 or 3016.102) and then using fix/repair in the Acrobat program to reinstall it, but the same output error exists.

Can you help?

ANSWER: Hi Jessica,

Two things come to mind. One check your document size and page setup. This looks a lot like that could be the issue. Its not that your PDF settings changed, rather that your doc settings or page setup changed. The other is to make sure you do not have a crop area active (either using the crop tool or object>crop area>release).

Thanks

Kevin

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Unfortunately neither is the case.  The sample I sent you was just a test of an earlier document saved with the correct settings and printing out to pdf perfectly last month.  Won't do it now.  I found this problem in doing a new document, so I went back to see if older ones would produce the same output as before.  They did not.  Something has changed in the system, not in my settings.  Becasue of the bleed, I set the doc size at 'custom' and it shows a print preview in the pdf window of a correct output - full page with crop marks and bleed showing.  As you can see from the image on the right that I submitted, only the very center - blown up all out of proportion - is produced.  Happens now on all 8.5x11 and larger docs.  I'm attaching an image of the pdf print preview to show you what is supposed to be output.  So, do you have any other thoughts?

Answer
Hi Jessica,

You should not be using the print window to create your PDFs out of Illustrator. Use the file save as>then choose Illustrator PDF. Once you hit ok, the pdf options dialogue box will open and you can choose bleed and crop marks in there. That will solve your issue.

Going through the print window forces you to choose a preset page size in the print window, just like you were printing normally. This will override your crop marks, etc. and give you the cropped image.

Use the save as command and things will go much smoother.

Thanks

Kevin