Re: crop marks?

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 12:02:35AM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Gavin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > However, they probably aren't in the right place. I don't really
> > understand what the cropmarks are for in the first place. Doesn't it
> > depend on what areas of a page a printer is capable of printing on,
> > which depends on the printer?
> 
> When printing an @smallbook book on regular paper (as an author would
> do while working on a book), the pages are (supposed to be) centered
> on the larger paper. You can't tell where the physically smaller borders
> really are. The cropmarks give you a visual clue as to what the end
> result will really be.

I looked at older versions of texinfo.tex and there does not seem to be 
any directive to change the physical page size in the output.  So 
originally @smallbook was intended for use with letter size paper.

For @cropmarks to be implemented properly, there would probably have to 
be a directive to set the paper size it is going to be printed on.

If you want to disable changing the physical page size for PDF output 
too, this change does that:

Index: texinfo.tex
===================================================================
--- texinfo.tex (revision 8191)
+++ texinfo.tex (working copy)
@@ -11320,18 +11320,18 @@
   \bindingoffset = #5\relax
   %
   \ifpdf
-    \pdfpageheight #7\relax
-    \pdfpagewidth #8\relax
+    %\pdfpageheight #7\relax
+    %\pdfpagewidth #8\relax
     % if we don't reset these, they will remain at "1 true in" of
     % whatever layout pdftex was dumped with.
     \pdfhorigin = 1 true in
     \pdfvorigin = 1 true in
   \else
     \ifx\XeTeXrevision\thisisundefined
-      \special{papersize=#8,#7}%
+      %\special{papersize=#8,#7}%
     \else
-      \pdfpageheight #7\relax
-      \pdfpagewidth #8\relax
+      %\pdfpageheight #7\relax
+      %\pdfpagewidth #8\relax
       % XeTeX does not have \pdfhorigin and \pdfvorigin.
     \fi
   \fi

This does show all the crop marks, although the page is not centred properly.
It was centred properly with some older versions of texinfo.tex I tried. 
Also I'm not confident that the crop marks are in the right place.