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Managing PDF Display Boxes

Display boxes define various boundaries (areas) on a page.

PDFClerk uses display boxes in two distinct and useful ways:

  1. It sizes and displays the PDF based page sources according to the setting chosen in the "Draw" submenu.
    This allows control over which part of the page is actually drawn onto screen/paper. The display boxes can be resized by PDFClerk. (See "Defining the Boxes" below.)
  2. It defines the display boxes of PDF documents generated through the various PDF export functions (PDF documents generated through the print dialog do not retain these settings).
    You can tell PDFClerk to visualise the display boxes on-screen choosing "Display Box Bounds" from the "View→Display" submenu. This will allow you to see how the boxes will be defined on each page in the generated PDF document.
    Documents generated from imposition mode "None" take their display boxes directly from the source on which each page is based. (See "Defining the Boxes" below.)
    Documents generated from any imposed mode take their display boxes according the the settings in the imposition template (use the Imposition Editor to control these settings).

Defining Display Boxes

The display boxes of the source pages can be sized either through the Display Boxes Inspector in the Inspector Panel.

The display boxes of the imposed pages are defined in the Impositions Editor for each imposition template. Bring up the editor, select the appropriate imposition and click the "Display Boxes" tab. For each box type you can choose to have no box, to derive the box from the sheet margins, printer marks or from the page (depending on the kind of box), or to set a manual size. Note that choosing "Derive Art Box from Page" for the Art Box will only have the box generated on one-up layouts, and only if the source page defines an art box. Also note that for all display boxes derived from marks to come out correctly on all pages, the number of pages in the document must be a multiple of the pages per signature. (Which can be calculated by multiplying the number of pages per sheet by the number of sheets per signature.)

See also

Layout Topics
Impositions & Templates
Impositions Editor