Slug Printing

Question

Hi All,
I am working in InDesign CS4.
Created an InDesign CS4 document with size (40 * 50 i.e width and height all are in points) and it contains some text frames
Created a slug area with dimension(0,0,0,120).
Created some text frames in slug area which contain some text
I tried to print the document as follows
Choose File>print, Print dialog open
In print dialog choose Setup and select the page size(50 * 60) i.e print Paper size is greater than our document size
Choose "Bleed and Slug" and Check the Include slug Area option
Send the document for printing.
Now I have found that some information from the slug area is missing
How I could solve the above problem
Anybody have an idea the please let me know
Thanks & Regards,
Alam

Answer 1

OK, now I understand and can reproduce the problem. What's happening is, as you say, all of the page content is scaled including whatever is in the bleed or slug area, but at print time when you include bleed or slug, those dimensions are always added as absolutes, not scaled, so you get the same bleed distance or slug size regardless of the scale. If you reduce to fit, for example and ask for crop and bleed marks, they will be spaced as specified for bleed in the document setup, so there will be a blank area outside the scaled art. Conversely, if you enlarge, part of the bleeding art will be cut off.
In a lot of ways this makes sense, at least as far as the bleed is concerned, since that's there to allow for cutter misalignments, and enlarging the art has no effect on cutter setup -- you don't need twice the bleed allowance for a document twice the size. It also makes sense since most documents are printed at layout size, where this is a non-issue, and that if you want to scale it's more important, in general, to maximize waht you can get onto the sheet. Marks and slugs get cut off, so you probaly don't want to waste paper on them and you don't want to increase the distance between pages on the sheet by moving marks further out than necessary, so I don't think this really qualifies as a bug but falls into the category of "as designed."
If you want to work around it, I think the only choice is to make the slug area larger and use less of it.
This raises the question in my mind of why you are scaling up to print? Is this a proof? If so is all of the information in the slug essential to see in the proof? If it isn't a proof, why are you making the documetn smaller than actual size? It certainly isn't a large document that needs to be created at smaller size to fit the limits of a page size or RIP capacity.
Peter