Learn in this article,
- which requirements must be met for this Fixup and
- how to apply the Fixup.
1. Introduction
The Fixup Remove Layers and crop to visible area is available in the Workflow. The aim of this Fixup is to flatten the currently visible content to one layer, delete all other layers and remove the white space around the Print Item.
2. General
The Fixup Remove Layers and crop to visible Area can be used if you want to keep the currently visible content and remove all other objects that are not displayed in the Print Item. This allows you to drastically reduce the data size of the PDF and prevent any errors in the subsequent processing steps.
Find the Fixup in the footer of the Document information and user-defined fields area in the Manage Layers Fixup group of an Article, Job or Production Job or in the Data Preparation tab.
3. Fixup Description
With this Fixup currently invisible layers and their objects can be removed from the PDF-file and the currently visible content can be reduced to one layer. Therefore, currently undisplayed layers are deleted along with their content, the currently visible content is moved to one layer and all other layers are removed.
3.1. Requirements and Functionality
For this correction to do what it promises, the following requirements must be met
- The Print Item has several layers
- Individual layers of the Print Item must be visible or invisible
Figure 1: The Remove Layers and crop to visible area dialog
Access the following options in the Fixup dialog:
- Template [1] – settings selected in the dialog can be saved as a template and thus applied to other Articles/Print Items.
- Layer Name [2] - in the selection menu, select the layers that will be deleted together with all objects on them when the Fixup is executed.
- Safety Margin [3] - use this to determine the size of the safety margin. For the Variable Content [5], select the desired placeholder - database field or user-defined field - from which the value for the safety margin should be retrieved.
- Ignore Registration Marks [4] - by ticking this box, existing regristration marks are ignored when cropping to the visible area and are therefore not displayed.
3.2. Before/After
To experiment with this function, you can refer to the sample file "Sample_Ebenen.pdf". In the sample file there are three layers, of which two layers are shown and one layer is hidden. The Layers "Hintergrund" and "Sonnenblumen" should be deleted and then cropped to the visible area. A safety margin of 3 mm should be retained.
After applying the Fixup, the file "Sample_Ebenen_End2.pdf" is created, where the two layers have been deleted and cropped to the visible area. The values were taken from Figure 1.
Figure 2: Left: initial file with all layers visible; Right: edited file where two layers were deleted and a safety margin of 3 mm was added
Article update: Workflow 1.18.0 – 08/2024