SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Hi all,

I am wondering if anyone can help us out with a PDF issue from Sage.

We are wanting to add our branding at the bottom of all our invoices but when saving to PDF it adds a bleed space. It looks great in Sage Report Designer where you insert the bmp of our logo i.e. the logo goes from one edge to the other but when we save the invoice directly out of Sage and open the PDF it adds in the unwanted bleed area i.e. the 10mm white space around the edge of the entire page.

We hardcopy print an invoice for the client on our own branded paper and we also send a digital copy and the digital copy we would like to reflect exactly what we have sent them as a hardcopy. The digital PDF is only intended for display purposes so we don’t need to consider any printing requirements. If the client then wishes to print from that it is their prerogative. We simply need to ensure the PDF on screen looks the way it should.

Is there any way to access the properties in which Sage creates the PDF document?

We are currently running version: 13.02.30.0144

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick.

My suggestion would be to make the footer section a little bit bigger.

This will move the logo up the page a bit and so get rid of the problem.

Hi Bruce,

I tried that already and nope doesn't work - I made the footer logo twice as big as an A4 peace of paper and it still adds the bleed marks. Have you tried your suggestion before and did it work? If it did I would really like to know how you did it.

I think the issue is how Sage is talking to the PDFMaker! However that would only be the case if you didn't get it to work so I'm keen to hear if you have tried it.

Thanks,
Nick.

I have worked out that Sage is using sagePDFprinter to create the PDF document so now I need to work out how I can modify the settings for this.

Exporting as a BMP file for example outputs a file that reflects EXACTLY what the preview and Report Designer looks like but as soon as I choose PDF it adds in the 10mm margin/bleed for printing. This file is only intended for display so this forced bleed margin is completely unnecessary.

Any further help on how we can remove this would be fantastic.

Thanks,
Nick.

Not sure I understand the issue here.

What do you mean by bleed marks?

There are margins that are blank, are you saying you have visible lines or crop marks or some other mark?

Making the foot the size of A4 is not going to result in anything usefull.

What happens if you just make the foot a little bit bigger, so that the edges of the logs are not in the bleed/margin area....

Hi Bruce,

We solved the problem!

The issue was specifically located to the functionality of the sagePDFprinter which is a very very basic stripped down hard default version of say PDFMaker (which MS Word uses).

For example:
Our branding runs the entire length of the A4 page in the footer area. The problem we were having is when you insert the image in the template designer it looks great, when you preview it, it looks great. If you export to say an image format like a .bmp it looks great i.e. the logo branding runs to the edge of the document. However if you choose to 'Export' from the Preview window and choose PDF as the file format you engage the sagePDFprinter driver which then imposes the bleed margins on the document when it is created. By doing this they have disregarded the WYSISYG (what you see is what you get) convention of data handling through export. There is no point imposing this given if you print to ANY domestic printer the bleeds are by default imposed when the image goes through the RIP process. Why Sage decided to add the bleed margins at the document creation step is in my opinion very restrictive and completely unnecessary. PDF is a universal document format used for both print and onscreen display …it is one of the most flexible exchange formats out there that can deliver content uniformly and correctly no matter who is viewing it – you can be guaranteed the client will be viewing your branding as it was intended. By imposing their bleed margin they are essentially saying that this document can ONLY be printed which is unacceptable if you are wanting to issue a PDF to a client with your branding identity.

I solved the issue our Accounts department were having by simply installing a freeware PDF creator called cutePDF and from Sage in the Preview window instead of choosing ‘Export’ if you select ‘Print’ and then in the dropdown window select cutePDF and done, it works perfectly. The output PDF reflects the preview window exactly and our invoices reflect the correct Marketing branding guidelines!

Anyway that was our solution, it is a shame we had to go to a third party application though. Sage should be flexible in recognizing the most universal exchange format in business today in both print and display incorporating the firms branding guidelines in their system operations. Companies spend millions of pounds on their corporate identity which I’m bemused why Sage doesn’t support.

Thanks for the assistance though, this forum was a great help in me problem solving the situation. Much appreciated.

Cheers
Nick.

"Our branding runs the entire length of the A4 page in the footer area."

So you have a vertical bar style logo that wants to overlay with the main body and you are doing this in the footer, I would not have thought you could get that to print at all.

I think I might have to have a play and see if I can get the body to overlay the footer, I can think of a lot of useful things I could do if I could do that. Any clues you can give on how you avoided getting get a page of text then a page of logo.

Your issue is simply that you wanted to bleed the image off of the page and the drivers impose a margin.

(There are plenty of good FREE PDF making software. My favourite is PDF creator. http://www.pdfforge.org/ )

The PDF creation software used by sage was not developed in house, it is a third party product that has been integrated. (http://www.amyuni.com/) To be frank it seems a strange move, to pay for software when there is plenty of really good open source software that they could have used and supported.

It sounds like the margins are not preset to 0 in the driver and that is causing your issue. The pdf printer driver you use for cutePDF has margins set at 0 and so it works.

Of course one of the big benefits of PDF's is that you can automatically email big batches of them from the application without having to key recipients, functionality that your solution does not allow.

Hey Bruce,

Exactly, you nailed it! I was hoping to actually get inside the sagePDFprinter and have a poke around but since it is locked off we did the option you suggested and loaded on a freeware printer driver.

I didn't realize Sage wasn't built in house. That explains it then!

Everything works great now and Marketing are happy that Accounts are conforming to the branding standards.

Cheers