Crop Mark Issue

[Emma]

Hope someone can help me here!

About a year ago we changed from sending jobs to plate straight from Quark (hand imposing them) to Apogee Prepress to sending them via Dynastrip (HURRAH!) which has made things a lot easier.

But we still have an awful lot of old jobs which get reprinted on a regular basis, so instead of re-imposing them using Dynastrip we tend to just PDF out the old hand imposed impositions using Quark, (DeviceN for Spots, CMYK for full colour) and drop them straight in the Prepress.

This has generated and issue with the crop marks, which are coloured Registration in Quark, where occasionally on a plate they come over as not just as the spot colours but CMYK as well. I even have one job where on the first plate the crop marks are the two spots we are using, and two spots and CMYK on the next, even though I generated this from a single Quark file with exactly the same crop marks on both pages!

It's not to much of an issue, and most of the time it's pretty obvious that you don't plate a plate with just crops on, but the boss has noticed and now wants answers, anyone have any idea whats going on??

Thanks

[oxburger]

Is there any reason you can't just turn off the plates you don't want using the Image TP?

See attached.

[Emma]

None what so ever!

But it's the boss wanting to know WHY it's happening in the first place unfortunately.

[oxburger]

The only thing I can think of is that maybe it's not the register marks at all that are causing the problem. Is it possible that there are hidden elements in your quark file that may be causing the CMYK to show up? something behind a white box or colored 0C, 0M, 0Y, 0K or a very light screen or even a photo that may be causing it. Or perhaps an Illustrator file that has been built as spots but may have a small process element within it..