[pdftex] pdf(pdflatex) vs ps(dvips) documents, crop marks, images

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Ulrich" == Ulrich Dirr <ud at art-satz.de> writes:

    > So I'm wondering what you mean by "I would not put the crop
    > marks into the original document."?

It means that I prefer this way.  It does not mean that your method is
wrong or worse. 

I use it to typeset my friend's thesis.  The advantage using pdfpages
is that it is much faster and, in my opinion, simpler.

It is faster because the text is not reformatted, only the pages from
an already formatted file are extracted.

It is easy to use because you do not have to change anything in the
LaTeX file.

Up to now I needed crop marks only for this thesis, but if I would
need it all the time I would instruct TeX to read the filename from
the command line, so that I could say

    pdflatex a5crop myfile.pdf

Today I looked into an ancient version of the APLAC documentation I
have at work and I think that there are many problems.  Simply scaling
down a document using a 12pt font by sqrt(2) scales the font size to
8.5pt, which is too small.  But the docs contain a lot of verbatim
environments so that it is impossible to reduce \textwitdh or enlarge
\fontsize.

To be able to decide which way is the best I need much more
information about the current project.  Probably your approach is
better.  But the question was how to scale an A4 document down to A5
and apply crop marks.  I think that my approach is quite simple.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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