inkscape should offer to set PDF boxes

Bug #1402388 reported by chrysn
12
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Inkscape
New
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

inkscape seems not to have a way to set the different named pdf boxes (MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox) when exporting a pdf. those boxes are vital when the resulting documents are processed further for bleed printing.

as opposed to bug #433184 and the bugs referenced there, this is not about helping the designer: it might be a useful addition to indicate those borders visually to the person using inkscape in visual mode, this bug is about exporting that.

i see three ways to implement that:

* have well-known object names whose bounding boxes are exported as the named boxes. the document author would, for example, create crop marks and group them into a group with id="trimbox", and create a rectangle on a hidden layer he'd id as "bleedbox".
* have dedicated document properties for that purpose (as an optional group in the Page tab). each box could be specified as an offset to the svg page size (eg. "bleed box has 4mm margin around the page, trim box has 10mm").
* the synthesis of those: instead of a margin relative to the page size, the user can pick an object whose bounding box is used as a named box.

note that svg does not have a notion of those boxes, so no matter how this is actually implemented, the data would need to be stored in a propriatary svg extension (sodipodi namespace).

i am currently using a workaround (attached) to set those boxes in postprocessing, based on exporting the pdf with --export-area-drawing and then setting the boxes manually based on the output of `inkscape --query-all`. while modifying pdf boxes is a suitable task for an external tool in general, this is definitely just a workaround, for it needs different invocations of inkscape using non-standardized interfaces and relying on the way inkscape puts coordinates in a pdf to work at all.

Tags: exporting pdf
Revision history for this message
chrysn (chrysn) wrote :
Revision history for this message
su_v (suv-lp) wrote :

Related to (or duplicate of):
- Bug #170758 (sf1219299) “Printer marks / boundaries on PDF export”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170758>

description: updated
tags: added: exporting pdf
Changed in inkscape:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
chrysn (chrysn) wrote : Re: [Bug 1402388] Re: inkscape should offer to set PDF boxes

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 02:51:54PM -0000, ~suv wrote:
> Related to (or duplicate of):
> - Bug #170758 (sf1219299) “Printer marks / boundaries on PDF export”
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170758>

just in case it might have gotton over wrong: this is not about crop
marks, imposition marks or color scale (as listed in bug #170758); those
issues and this wishlist item may complement each other, but solving one
does not help the other. (the topic of this bug might be subsumed in the
"infos" bullet, but then it's not very clear what it means).

best regards, and thanks for your quick tagging
chrysn

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