Multiple crop marks in Ai CS3

Ai CS3, Win Xp Pro
I'm setting up business cards for two color printing and need crop marks around each card. Total of 4 cards, 7 cuts. In searching for Multiple Cropmarks on the internet, I'm finding articles that say it's not possible. However, I'm now looking at an Adobe livedocs help page that says:
Define and view additional crop areas
Select the Crop Area tool, and then do any of the following:
To create a new crop area, hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and drag. Each crop area has a unique number in the upper-left corner.
To view all crop areas, press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS).
To set a crop area as the active crop area, hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and click the crop area you want active.
To rotate between crop areas, press Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) and click an arrow key.
When I select the first cropped area with the crop tool, and attempt to copy it using the ALT key, a number 1 shows up in the upper left corner (ok so far). But as soon as I let go of the mouse button, the cropped area just moves to the place I've copied it to, and still has the number 1 in the corner. When I have the crop tool selected, and an area defined, I can press Enter and get a menu. There is an exclamation icon at the bottom signifying "Crop areas: 1", but there's no box to select multiple crops.
Am I SOL, or is there a trick to this?
Thanks,
Sandoer

Ok, I've sort of answered my own question with a little more research.
For those that search this topic, here's what I discovered:
If you have several items that need to be cut, such as business cards, 8 or 10 up on an 8.5x11 sheet, you can
+create a stroked box at 2x3.5 (for business cards) around each card.
+one at a time, select a box and from the drop down menus select Filter>Create>Crop marks.
This will create marks that a printer can use for multiple cuts.

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Hi,
I think I have been working longer on trying to add crop marks and bleed to a business card then actually designing the artwork. Adobe really pisses me off with these PDF, Illustrator nonsense. Why is it SO complicated to add crop mark and registration marks to send to a printer?
When I add a "Crop Area" in AI why it's not included when I export to PDF press quality? why do I need to start going through the crazy Acrobat Advanced menu? add printer marks... resize the page using the Crop Pages option... and then loosing my bleed background.
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Thanks
Mic

Hi guys, you're really going about the whole thing wrong...as a prepress person I need to impose your designs to get best efficiency on the press. I will proably delete all your marks anyway and add my own.....however, my imposition programs use the HIDDEN crop, trim and bleed boxes in your artwork. If you make a huge page in illustrator and plonk your art somewhere arbitrarily in the centre I have to mess arounf for a few minutes to try to work out where your boxes lie. I am pretty careful, but I cannot guarantee other operators out there so you will probably start at the press with an error tolerance before you even start printing.
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Now some of our clients need to show multiple cards up on a sheet to their clients so do not like this...but there is a trick. All you need to do is pull out an artboard around all your smaller cards. Take note of what artboard number this one is. Then all you do is export to pdf and only put that number into the Pages to be exported dialog (and put the other pages into the finished art file being sent to your printer). The one going to your client can have manual trim artwork added but clients don't need rego or colour marks so don't worry.
Everyone happy and really easy to do as this is how the program was built to be used
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We have 2 feet of snow on the ground here and are expecting 10-20 more inches of snow starting around noon! DC is basically shut down. I live right in the middle of the District, and the roads are a mess here. I can't imagine how bad the suburbs are.
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I don't know how far you have been up to with your code. I never really cropped the artwork by code, I only placed the crop marks using this code:
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I did a quick online search and came up with the following.
http://technology.cca.edu/helpsheets/Photoshop_CS3.pdf
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Kev Gilmour

Wow... I'm using Photoshop CS5 for Windows and have just encountered this very same problem. The print preview shows the corner crop marks in the correct location as designated by the Bleed... setting (.1"); but when I print, the bleed setting gets ignored and the corner crop marks revert to the outer edges of the image.
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Can anyone tell me how to place the crop marks for a multiple page project ?
For example on a left page do i have to set the crop marks only on the left side of the page or all around it ?
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jeffozan wrote:
*i'm using PS because i have no experience with ID.
You plan to use Photoshop to lay out an entire magazine? I'll say a prayer for you.

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Thanks for your replies, I have ran the update on my illustrator and am now running 16.0.4 (as shown in screen shot) but still do not have this option.
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I’ve only run into this with one client. He sends me individual epses, each one a business card to print. When I open them in Illustrator it looks like there are crop marks and bleed, when I place in InDesign, as I always do, to set 8 up on a page the bleed won’t print and the crop marks won’t print. I can enlarge the object box and see the bleed and crop marks but they still wont print. If I print directly from Illustrator just to test it, it will print the bleed but still no crop marks. This is all in CS3 but was the same when I had CS2.

I always prefer to use trim marks (crop marks as opposed to crop area) and fit the artboard to them.
I'm with you, Steve. I did it that way for years mainly because it left no room for ambiguity (and because that's what made sense to those of us who used to paste layout elements down on artboards with rubber cement).
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The instruction sounds a little odd they are referring to a bleed that is normally 1/8 inch larger than the caual trim size.
Their description is misleading from what isee since the neglected to mention bleed. Of course if everything is within the safe area then there is no need for bleed.
Here is a video showing what i think they left out or it is not visible in the text you display.
http://www.wadezimmerman.com/videos/CropMarks10UpLables.mov

Multiple crop marks in Ai CS3

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