Attached a workflow that does this - in this workflow I extended it to support multi-page documents by splitting each document to its individual pages and then joining them back together after the bleed has been added. I also included an external node to clean up the temp files that have been created by the save nodes.
Received a question about adding bleed to documents by mirroring content.
That can be fully automated using the following workflow.
The original file in this case is a PDF without bleed and (to make it a little harder) without PDF boxes.
The first component Resizes the PDF to 100% of it's original size.
This will not change the PDF, but it will ensure the PDF has a trimbox since Resize will add the selected PDF box to the document if it is not there.
The document now has a PDF trimbox (which is shown as green in Acrobat)
In order to add mirrored bleed content to the PDF we need 3 copies of the original document:
- A horizontally mirrored version for top and bottom bleed content
- A vertically mirrored version for top and bottom bleed content
- A vertically and horizontally mirrored version for the bleed content in the corners
These versions are created by imposing the document 1up using an Automatic press sheet size without selecting Size options.
This will ensure the output document is the size of the input file's trimbox since the imposition using the trimbox and the margins are set to zero. If the PDF has white area around the trimbox this step will remove it.
The mirroring is define using the Cell Transformation Mode controls on the top, right of the imposition Preview
This enabled the options to rotate and mirror layout cells.
A sequence of impose and save components create and save the mirrored versions of the document that are needed.
The Save components use the FFC Job ID variable to ensure unique filenames and to ensure the watermark component pulls in the expected files
The last imposition in the sequence above return the document to its nominal orientation.
A few notes:
The Save component should use a full windows path for the location as the Save Destinations and the PDFs sandbox locations are in different places in the filesystem.
The workflow above will work for single page documents. This can be extended to cover additional document pages, but the workflow must be built for a fixed number of pages.
If extending the above to work with documents that have more than 1 page, the Save component must save 1 page PDF files as the watermark component will add 1 page PDFs. As such, which would mean using Split to duplicate the document and then using Split again to create single page PDFs before saving.
The last steps in the workflow is adding the bleed content to the original document.
This is done in two steps:
Resize will push the PDF cropbox outward to make space for the bleed content.
If a cropbox is not defined, Resize will define it before resizing it.
The document now has .25" is space for bleed content:
Lastly, the Watermark component will place the mirrored versions of the document in the bleed area.
The URL for the PDF uses the same variable to ensure that the proper file is pulled into the document.
Placement is done relative to the trimbox with any non-centered content being placed outside of the trimbox
The resultant PDF has bleed which is created by mirroring content from the original PDF
Note: The above example shows the bleed content. In production this would be better suited to jobs that use solid colors or patters that can be repeated without creating an obvious line in the document.
Lastly - the workflow should end in an external node to invoke a batch file that will remove the files saved by the Save components in the workflow. That's out of scope for this howto post.
One last note - to use this workflow in multiple workflows, add a hot folder pointing to this workflow and a save node to the end of the workflow.
In another workflow, create an external Hot Folder node that will save the file to the hot folder for this workflow. That external node shoudl look for the processed file at the same location that the Save component at the end would use.