I’m getting married soon (whoo!) and me and J are working on a 12-page program. Each page is 5.5 X 8.5, arranged so that 4 fit on a letter sized sheet, 2 to a side. Then I take the 3 sheets and fold them to make the program. Simple, right? Well, the problem is that I can’t get Quark to output the pages in the proper order automatically, so that I’ve taken instead to manually reformatting the program so that Quark thinks of it as 6 letter sized pages. This works, but it’s not ideal. How do I do this the correct way?
This is one of the classic problems of the printing trade, it is known as “booking.” The problem of how you lay out your pages so they appear in correct sequence and orientation when they’re printed, folded and cut changes for each length of book. That is, you lay out the pages differently depending on how many pages in the book. There is an algorithm for this but it is complex to explain.
The “correct” way to handle this in XPress would be to buy an XTension like InPosition. But that is very expensive, and overkill for such a small book.
As I always say, there are two solutions for every problem, the money-intensive solution, and the labor-intensive solution. If it was me, I’d pick the labor intensive solution:
Fold a mock-up of your book but don’t cut the half-pages apart. Write the page numbers BIG on each little page and then unfold them, and see how the pages fall on the sheets, in what order and what orientation. Then duplicate this layout manually in XPress. Yeah, it’s a pain. The biggest problem with manual booking is if you have graphics that spread across adjacent pages, a “double-page spread.” In that case, you must take great pains to split graphics so that they are cut where the fold-line falls. Most designers save work by only doing double page spreads on the 2 centermost pages.
If you have more questions, or if I was totally off-base about your problem, let me know, I’ll try to help.
Congratulations on the marriage…
If I’m reading this correctly you are using single facing pages right?
New Document set to Landscape, take master page A and create 2 more pages. Go to your master page A, set the ruler guides where you need them (ie at 5.5" include margins etc). Go back to the first page of your document, Front cover will be the right side of the first 8 1/2 x 11 sheet, Back cover will be the left side. Page two will be the right side of the second sheet, 3 will be the left side of the second sheet etc. Make sense? Do this also, create a dummy by taking three 8 1/2 x11 sheets and folding them in the ladscape position, this will show you how to set up you Doc. I do this everyday all day and it’s easier to do than to explain, hope I helped. I’ll check back later to see how it’s going.
I guess I didn’t explain myself so well, but I already did pretty much exactly what Chas.E described as the labor-intensive solution (an apt phrase, I must say). Do you know of any cheaper XTensions that might work? It doesn’t matter so much for this project, because we’re mostly done, but it would be nice for future use.
I’ve looked and looked and I’ve never found any cheap solution to the booking problem except the labor-intensive way I described. Personally, I think Quark should offer booking as a standard feature, but they’ve been so slow to fix bugs in existing features that I stopped hoping for improvements to the package.
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Mr. S and I have 25+ years of printing experience between us, and we’ve never heard it called this. The more common term would be imposition. It may come in handy if you’re doing searches, asking around, etc.
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I have an old, old version of Quark (3.32) and, FWIW, the one time I did a booklet-type thing, I had to fake the imposition too.
Scarlett, the term InPosition is a trade name for a specific product. Booking is just one of the problems of imposition, imposition also refers to doing things like ganging up 4 plates that are to be printed together and then cut and not bound. Or at least that’s how my 1975 Weyerhauser Pocket Pal describes it.
Thanks, guys.