Register marks for Zünd, Mimaki, Summa and Esko
·6 min read
Every cutter reads registration differently, and a file set up for one machine will usually fail on another. These are the details that matter, and the mistakes that waste a sheet.
A dot is a filled disc, not a stroked circle
The most common failure is exporting a register mark as a stroked circle. The camera looks for a solid area of ink; a 6mm circle with a 0.25mm stroke gives it a thin ring, and on a light substrate the camera either misses it or finds its centre off by the stroke width.
Draw the mark as a filled shape at the diameter the machine expects — 6mm on most flatbed camera systems — and keep the fill 100% of a single ink so it stays dense through the RIP.
Placement rules that repeat
- Keep a clear margin around every mark: nothing printed within a couple of millimetres, or the camera locks onto artwork.
- Marks belong outside the trim, in the sheet margin — never inside a piece where they will be cut through.
- Three marks minimum for skew correction; four corners is standard on flatbeds.
- On long roll work, repeat marks down the length so the machine can re-register between segments rather than extrapolating.
- Turn marks off along an edge deliberately, not accidentally — if bleed has to butt up along a long edge, that edge cannot carry dots.
Machine by machine
- Zünd: camera-read filled dots, corner placement, cut processes on separate layers so each tool can be selected in ZCC.
- Mimaki: crop-mark style corner marks with a defined quiet zone; roll work reads marks per segment.
- Summa: OPOS markers read by an optical sensor, so contrast against the substrate matters more than size.
- Esko / Kongsberg: mark plus barcode workflows, where the mark set has to match the layout the front end produced.
Keep marks out of the ink
Register marks are machine guides. Set them to overprint so they do not knock a white hole through artwork, and keep them on their own layer named for what they are — Register — rather than mixed into the cut layer, where they will be read as geometry to cut.
Piece labels are the other collision risk. If labels are dropped into the same margin they will sit on top of a mark and blind the camera; they belong in a clear part of the gutter, rotated into a side margin if there is no room at the top.
In the suite
Choose the machine profile and the mark size, shape and quiet zone follow. Per-edge toggles let you drop dots along an edge where bleed has to butt, artboards grow so a mark near the sheet edge is never clipped, and labels are placed clear of every mark automatically.
Run it on a live job
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