Thumb tabs with bleed

Question

I was trying to figure out how to get the thumb tabs to extend beyond the page crop lines but I didn’t find any setting in PTXprint. It would be nice to have a setting to do this.

In the mean time, I found that if I made a small change to the ptx-cropmarks.tex file and then adjusted the tab length, I could accomplish this. Here is what I changed (2 places marked with RJA change):

ptx-cropmarks.tex fix1484×536 139 KB

I basically changed the kern value from -1 to -15 and then I used a thumb tab length of 15.0 in PTXprint. Now it looks like this:

Tabs with bleed1554×424 28.5 KB

Cutting along the crop marks will guarantee that we don’t have any whitespace on the edge of the tab.

Answer 1

We do apply 1pt of bleed. Perhaps there needs to be more. How much bleed do you need? 15pt feels rather a lot.

Answer 2

We are now using an 8pt bleed. 1pt was too small when we used the crop marks to cut the page. 8pt gave us enough bleed when using the crop marks to make sure it would extend beyond the crop marks. Would it be possible to add an option to adjust the bleed (especially when using the crop marks)?

Answer 3

Just to report, the bleed for tabs has been controllable for a few weeks now. The default value is 5pt, and if that’s not sufficient it can be changed by including, e.g.:

\def\TabBleed{9pt}

in your ptxprint-mods.tex file.
This only affects thumbtabs.

Answer 4

BTW a TabBleed of > 5pt doesn’t really make sense. TabBleed only makes sense if you have crop marks turned on. And we allow a 5pt gap between the margin and the top and bottom crop marks. So if you cut outside of 5pt accuracy, you are going to see bits of the crop mark in your final output. So if a printer can’t cut accurate to 5pt (1.75mm) you are going to have problems elsewhere.

Typing that does feel a little draconian. But so far nobody has reported problems. If they do, then we can perhaps use the TabBleed to control the amount of gap between a cropmark and its target.