Best way to define a Latex document with crop mark for printing

Question

I'd like to do a document that will be printed by a professional printer. To print it I need to add a margin around the document so that during the page cutting no blank margin will appear. Here is what I want:

• Be able to display the crop marks above the text, pictures, and tikz (using absolute positionning in the page)
• Be able to output easily only the document without the margin around the document, without changing anything.

I tried several things, use memoir, beamer, the crop package... But no one allow me to do that easily. Here is an example using the crop package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usepackage[paperwidth=4in,paperheight=6in,margin=0.25in,bottom=1in,top=1in,nohead]{geometry}
\usepackage[cam,a4,center]{crop}
\begin{document}
Hello
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
  \node (back names) [shape=rectangle, fill=blue, minimum height=40mm, minimum width=\paperwidth + 1cm, anchor=south west] at (current page.south west) {};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

As you can see, the text goes above the crop mark

Any idea ? Thank you !

-- EDIT -- I found a kind of solution here, which uses atbegshi that I adapted to work with the crop package:

\RequirePackage{atbegshi}\AtBeginShipoutInit
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[paperwidth=4in,paperheight=6in,margin=0.25in,bottom=1in,top=1in,nohead]{geometry}
\usepackage[cam,a4,center,pdftex]{crop}
\usepackage{eso-pic}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}

\begin{document}
Hello
\null\AddToShipoutPictureBG*{%
  \begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
    \node (back names) [shape=rectangle, fill=blue, minimum height=40mm, minimum width=\paperwidth + 1cm, anchor=south west] at (current page.south west) {};
  \end{tikzpicture}%
}
\end{document}

The idea is to embeed all the images that are supposed to be below the crop mark in the code

\null\AddToShipoutPictureBG*{%
% Write here the image
}

There are however two problems:

• I don't know how to put the picture above the text AND below the crop marks
• It's a bit heavy to write
• EDIT : and I also realize that it was not possible to use AddToShipoutPictureBG* twice...

Answer 1

Here is a bit of a kludge. It involves the creation of 3 separate files:

1. the main file with the actual content,
2. a separate file that contains nothing but crop marks, and
3. a wrapper file that uses the pdfpages package to overlay the crop marks on top of the content pages. For example:

File content.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[papersize={5in,7in},margin=1in,bottom=1in,top=1in,nohead]{geometry}
\usepackage{pgffor,lipsum,graphicx}

\begin{document}

\foreach \x in {1,2, ..., 5}{\lipsum[\x]  \newpage}

\newgeometry{margin=0in}
\includegraphics[height=\paperheight]{/data/graphics/fun/popeye-blue}

\end{document}

File emptycrop.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[papersize={4in,6in},margin=0.25in,bottom=1in,top=1in,nohead]{geometry}
\usepackage[cam,a4,center,pdftex]{crop}
\usepackage{pgffor}

\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}

\foreach \x in {1,2, ..., 10}{\null \newpage}

\end{document}

File wrapper.tex

\documentclass[a4]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{xcolor}% http://ctan.org/pkg/pdfpages

\usepackage[margin=0in]{geometry}

\begin{document}
\makeatletter
\includepdf[
   pages=-,
   noautoscale,
   scale=1,
   picturecommand={\put(0,0){\includegraphics[page=\thepage]{emptycrop}}}]
  {content.pdf}
\makeatother
\end{document}

Note that I defined the paper size for the content a bit larger than for the crop mark file. When you compile them all in sequence, the last page of wrapper.pdf looks like this:

While the three-file setup may be a bit clunky, you don't really have to worry about it most of the time - you only have to do this once at the very end.