Illustrator can apply crop marks, bleed and registration marks in numerous ways. Which is best?

How to set up crop marks in Adobe Illustrator

What is the best way to set up printers' crop marks in Illustrator documents?

Many designers prefer to save Adobe Illustrator artwork as EPS files and import the documents into page layout programs such as InDesign or QuarkXpress.

However, sometimes it is desirable to apply the crop marks in the Illustrator application itself. For example, this may be desirable when supplying logos, or single page advertisements.

Adobe Illustrator has a two main techniques for adding crop marks to artwork. You can apply crop marks either to the page border, or to a simple graphic object. Firstly, draw a rectangle over the area that you want to crop, go to the Object menu and select Crop Area and then Make. If you want to apply the crop marks to the whole page then simply deselect all objects and go through the same process.

However, there is a downside to the above method, in that crop marks that are generated via the Object menu are locked within the document and cannot be easily altered, which may be an issue later on at the pre-press stage. A better method may be to select the object to be cropped (no need for a rectangular shape this time) and then go to the Illustrator Filter menu, select Create and then Crop Marks. However, to apply this method to the whole page requires that a rectangular shape the same size as the page be drawn first and then the cropmarks filter applied.