Registration Marks - lifelike/countersheetsextension GitHub Wiki

Registration Marks are used to make manual cutting of countersheets easier. They are not the type of marks used to align a countersheet in a die-cutter. For that kind of marks they have to be added to the SVG template manually (can be done in a separate layer before running the extension).

Generate registration marks by setting Registration Marks Length to some positive number. If a number without units are given it will be interpreted as SVG user units (also known as px) which is rarely useful (that length depends on the document template used and is for instance different in the default templates for A4 and letter size documents, not to be confused with screen pixels). The default length is 10pt. Other units that could be useful to use would for instance include mm or in.

To put move the registration marks away from the counters, making it less likely that small parts of the marks are visible after cutting out the counters, the setting Registration Marks Distance can be set. It is set to a distance with unit as described in the previous paragraph for Registration Marks Length.

Registration marks are by default only generated on the front of sheets and appear as dashed lines outside of the edges of each generated block of counters. To also add registration marks to the backside of countersheets enable the Registration Marks Both Sides option.

Registration marks on the back can be useful for cutting out the front and backside counters separately and then using them together, for instance when printing prototype cards to place in card sleeves together. Do not enable them unless they are really required, to avoid small parts of registration marks being visible when cutting out double-sided components that have been glued together.

Example output with registration marks on front only:

Example output with registration marks on both sides:

When using a cs_layout layer to control where to put counters the marks will be added around the area marked up for each block, so no matter what length of marks are used the counters will show up at the same locations.

When not using cs_layout, which means the entire document page area will be used as one big block to fill with counters, the marks will start along the page borders and grow inwards, so the longer the registration marks are the fewer counters will fit on the page.

Registration marks can be styled by having an object with id cs_regstyle anywhere in the drawing before generating the countersheet. The style of that object will be copied verbatim into the style attribute of every generated registration mark line.

Enabling the Full Registration Marks option causes registration marks to go all the way across blocks of counters instead of just appear along the edges. (This is not really recommended as it requires very precise cutting of the sheets to not leave remains of the lines visible. For cutting sheets using scissors it has its merits though and there might be other special cases when it can be useful.)

Example output with full registration marks: