I've seen this question in one other place on the forum, but it doesn't look like it ever got answered. It's been driving me nuts for months, so I'm going to try to do a very simple walkthrough for this problem to find out if this is a glitch in the software, or I'm doing something wrong.
When telling Acrobat XI Pro to print a PDF with "Trim Marks," the marks are applied to the "CropBox" instead of the "TrimBox." As far as I'm concerned, this is incorrect behavior. Acrobat 9 Pro, on the other hand, applies the Trim Marks to the TrimBox. Since I receive files with bleed and need to print out a sample on the printer on a regular basis, I have found it necessary to leave Acrobat 9 installed just to print these files. I've done a very simple walkthrough on how to generate a very simple mockup file from InDesign and output it to better illustrate the problem.
I've created a new InDesign document that is 5x7 inches with 1/8" bleed. To make it easier to spot the applicable boxes in the file, I've made a box with a 1/2 point stroke. I made a magenta stroked box that's 5x7 inches to signify the trim, and a cyan stroked box that's 5.25 x 7.25 inches to signify the bleed. I then output it to a high resolution PDF. For the purposes of this example to make sure this can be replicated easily, I'm using the built-in [PDF/X-4:2008] preset to start off with. The only adjustment I'm making to this preset is going to the "Marks and Bleeds" section to check the "Use Document Bleed Settings."
When opening the resulting PDF in Acrobat XI Pro, you can see that the various "Page Boxes" have been applied properly. "CropBox" is set to 0 to include all of the artwork in the file, "BleedBox" is set to 0 since there's nothing outside of the bleed area in this pdf, and "TrimBox" is set to 0.125 in since we gave this file 1/8" bleed. When going to print the file, you can go to "Advanced" and then "Marks and Bleeds" to enable printing with the "Trim Marks." Once you click ok, you can see in the preview image that the trim marks are lining up to the cyan box instead of the magenta box.
As an extra step, it's possible to confirm that the trim marks are going to the crop box and not the bleed box or trim box. If you add a slug to your InDesign document and reoutput the pdf (being sure to include the slug area in the "Marks and Bleeds" section), you will find that the Trim Marks are even further outside of the cyan box. If you output your PDF from InDesign with Trim Marks already applied, you can turn on the Trim Marks option when going to print in Acrobat to see that Acrobat's Trim Marks are going outside of the crop box as well instead of overlapping the ones generated by InDesign.
Is there any fix for this behavior aside from opening the files in Acrobat 9 and printing from there instead?