How do you make sure your file includes bleeds? The printer said it didn't. I converted a Quark 5.01 file with Acrobat 6.0 Pro. –Brad Bloomquist

Acrobat 6 Pro can show you if a file has bleeds or not, but it can NOT add them if it doesn't. You'll need a 3rd party tool such as BoxEditor  –Leonard Rosenthol

In Quark, in the print menu/on the bleed tab, you need to include an amount of bleed when postscripting out of Quark. If you exported a PDF out of Quark in the Export as PDF Menu, you need to select the Options Menu, then go to the Output tab. At the bottom of that menu, change bleed type to Symmetric and enter a bleed amount there. Once the pdf is created, check it in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader visually to see if the bleeds were included. An easy way to check this is to make sure that you are including registration and crop marks, and you will visually see the bleed extended beyond the crop marks. --Clifford Scott

Acrobat Pro can not only detect the BleedBox, but add and/or adjust the Crop/Trim/Bleed/ArtBoxes in menu/Document/Pages/Crop -> pulldown. This may solve your problem. This comes in handy when opening files, e.g., from Illustrator or other apps, in which either no boxes have been determined and/or the MediaBox has been purposely oversized to accommodate for printers marks (eg, 9.5x12) and imposition downstream. If there are no boxes coming from the source apps, then the Viewer's printers marks (set in Acrobat's Advanced Print dialog, available only in Pro) will be invisible until the BleedBox and TrimBoxes box are set. Besides the ruler and or grid, turn on the display of art/trim/bleed in Menu/Acrobat/preferences/page display (OS X) or Menu/edit/preferences/page display (WIN) to display and control your changes and placement of the Boxes in the Viewer. –Mark Tezak

Editor's note: For unedited, unlimited tips delivered to your e-mail box, sign up here. The editors and owners of PDFzone.com do not necessarily share the opinions of discussion board posters and do not endorse any particular software product(s) or vouch for accuracy in descriptions of how a particular piece of software (or feature)