Pages/Layers > Page mounting Index

Set layout/working area

This function allows you to surround the printed page with a margin or border which will later contain crop marks, registration marks and the name of the colour separation. You use registration marks to make sure that individual separations in a colour document line up during printing.

Crop marks allow you to print a batch of pages and trim them to the correct size later.

The name of the colour separation is important for colour documents. As a rule, individual separations for the four basic process colours as well as any spot colours of a document are printed or imageset on the same (monochrome) output device. These separations often appear very similar, particularly with photographs. It is therefore very important to know with which colour a given separation should be printed. That is the reason for including the colour separation name, which can also be printed in the set margin area. Normally you would trim off this margin with its markings from the final page, so it contains no data for the final document though it can be very useful during production. For this reason you will only see the working area and not the complete sheet on the screen when editing a page normally, except when editing master pages (see below), which are always displayed complete, including registration and crop marks and the name of the colour separation.

When you click on the icon shown above, the following dialog box will appear:

Herewith a description of the individual parameters:

Registration marks

Registration marks help you to align colour separations. With multi-colour documents the printing house will insist on registration marks, as otherwise it is unlikely that they will be able to line up the separations correctly. These marks appear as circles with cross-hairs in each corner of the margin area and are always positioned so that they appear in the middle of it. Their maximum size as well as the line width can be set in the dialog. The size 0 here means that the optimum size of registration marks for the available space will be used, so it can really be left that way in all cases as a standard value.

Crop marks

Crop marks are printed as vertical and horizontal lines which mark the corners of the page, so that the corners of the final trimmed pages lie exactly at the intersection of the lines. Since guillotines are never 100 percent accurate, the lines are not extended up to the cutting point but (normally) drawn a little shorter by an adjustable amount. In the inner areas of the margin, frames will be printed quite normally. Thus overhang of a tinted or shaded frame prevents white margins appearing after trimming with a slightly inaccurate guillotine. All frame information that extends beyond the crop marks will not be printed (which would not be sensible, after all, since it would be removed after trimming in any case).

Overlap marks

Switch on the use of overlap marks if you have entered a sensible, non-zero value for the overlap (see below).

Colour layer names

If you select the Yes radio button for Colour layer names, then the name of the corresponding printing colour will appear in the bottom border area of each page. So the separation to be printed in cyan will have the text Cyan output there.

Colour wedge

If you want a simple colour wedge to be output in the margin area with the document, click on the relevant Yes field. During output Calamus then creates a colour wedge (usually in the right margin) that displays the most important colour values as filled squares: C, M, Y, K, R, G and B.

Greyscale wedge

If you want a simple greyscale wedge to be output in the margin area with the document, click on the relevant Yes field. During output Calamus then creates a greyscale wedge (usually in the right margin) that displays ten fields with grey values from 0 to 100 %.

Clear reg. mark area

If you enter a non-zero value here then a white line of the set width will be placed behind the registration and crop marks. This ensures that both sets of marks can be seen clearly even on dark backgrounds.

Overlap

When you are laying out bound, double page documents like magazines or books, an object which spans two pages can disappear after binding. To overcome this effect you can arrange that two opposing pages should have a partial overlap, so that a small inner portion of the left page will be printed on the right page and vice versa. As a result, the inner portion of the page will be printed twice: Once on the right side of the left page, and once on the left side of the right page. You may be familiar with this principle from car atlasses referred to earlier (see Frame editing module, Tiling frame), where the borders of the pages also overlap. If this overlap is adjusted correctly for the binding method, the maps and text will really look continuous across the divide after binding.
So enter the width of the binding in the relevant field of the dialog. This is the width of the strip that will not be visible on one page due to the binding. If you are working with stitched sheets then you have to enter zero here, of course. There is no need to specify anything here if you don't use any elements that cross the central divide.
As the elements in the overlap region are defined once but printed twice, the displayed double page will look smaller by the width of this overlap strip.

Line weight

Here you can define the line weight (width) to be used for printing registration, crop and overlap marks.

Max. reg. mark size

Here you can set the position of the registration marks in the border that you define with Working area (see below). This size will be evaluated in relation to the border and the following Used area value. If you wish to have the largest possible registration marks irrespective of the other settings, set this value to zero – it will then be established automatically.

Area used for marks

This percentage value specifies how long the crop marks may be relative to the defined border, or how far they should be spaced from each corner of the document. If you define a border of 1 cm and set Area used for marks to 50 %, then all crop marks will be only 0.5 cm long. Registration marks will then also be output in an area 0.5 x 0.5 cm placed as far away as possible from the edge of the document in the working area.

Text height

This value refers to the system font incorporated in Calamus, with which the colour layer name and the Info text will be output in the working area of the document. Values below 3 p are not sensible.

Info

Here you can define an information line that will always be output with the page contents (if possible at the lower edge of the page) – ideal for Copyright labels and other important information.
With some control codes you can also generate certain Info texts automatically, namely:

$DN

Document name

$CD

Creation date

$MD

Modification date

$CT

Creation time

$MT

Modification time

Tip: If you do not want an Info text but wish to place the colour layer name as low as possible in the film separations, input a single space character as the Info text!

Working area (margins)

Here you can define the so-called working area (in other words including the margins around your actual document). It will be included in the document window display if the switch Crop marks visible/invisible in the Display function group of the Frame editing module is activated (see there for details).
Furthermore the complete working area will be printed/output if the printing module Crop marks in the Print dialog has its checkbox crossed (see there).