[XeTeX] PDF Media, Trim, and Bleed boxes in XeTeX

[William Adams]

On Jul 10, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Chris Yocum wrote:

> I have a feeling that this is a rather naive/dumb question but I will
> raise it nonetheles.  I have been looking into creating pre-press
> quality (PDF X-1a at least) PDFs via XeLaTeX.  It seems that most things
> are there: embedded fonts (pdffonts tells me that they are), hyperxmp
> for metadata, etc.  The only thing missing seems to be the TrimBox and
> Bleed Boxes.  Is there a way to get these into XeTeX?  I can do it using
> \special but it seems like something the geometry package should do when
> knows it will produce PDFs (and should work with the crop package).  

Correct. Unfortunately, the geometry package doesn't support this. I've always used \special

> I
> had a look at the pdfx package, which doesn't work with XeLaTeX, and it
> seems to set the Boxes statically in the code.  It would seem to me that
> they should be calculated at the time of document creation or am I
> completely missing the point?

No, again the pdfx package would need to be extended to have xelatex support.

Perhaps support for the nifty pdf commands is the next thing which should be ported to xetex?

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.