Regardless of whether your files are formatted for custom page sizes or standard page sizes, you need to add crop marks if your files are going to be printed on offset press or many on-demand printing devices. For some on-demand equipment such as Xerox DocuTechs and other devices that print on single sheet standard page sizes, you won’t need to add crop marks.

When crop marks are needed for printing your files, follow these steps to add crop marks in Acrobat:

1. Open a document in Acrobat Professional. For these steps you need Acrobat Professional. Acrobat Standard does not have a Print Production toolbar.

2. Open the Print Production toolbar. Open a context menu on the Acrobat Toolbar Well and select Print Production to open the Print Production toolbar. The Printer’s Marks tool and the Crop tool are needed to add printer’s marks to your document.

3. Add Printer’s Marks. Click the Add Printer’s Marks tool in the Print Production toolbar and the Add Printer’s Marks dialog box opens. You can selectively add the type of marks you want to appear on your document by checking the various marks check boxes.

4. Crop the pages. When you click OK in the Add Printer Marks dialog box, you won’t see any changes in your document—that’s because the printer marks exist outside the page dimensions. You need to enlarge the pages so the crop marks are visible.

To make the document pages appear larger, click the Crop Pages tool in the Print Production toolbar and the Crop Pages dialog box opens. Click the Custom radio button and type a width and height larger than the page sizes. As a standard page size to accommodate crop marks, add 1 inch to the page width and height. Over in the Page Range area of the Crop Pages dialog box, click All to apply your marks to all pages.

5. Preview the PDF document. Click OK in the Crop Pages dialog box and the printer’s marks appear on all pages in the document.