Fix CS3's Print Booklet !!

The minute I have to provide a UI for this script, it stops being a quickie job done on weekends and becomes a full-blown development effort with all kinds of considerations that add enormously to the scale of the job. For one thing, it immediately creates the need for a terminology that matches that of the industry.

Consider creep. I've not thought about adding it yet, although it is fairly easy to do (and doesn't require an inner bleed). But it does require an interface. You have to be able to say how much creep you want. And you probably want to do it using the measurement units of your choice. So, I need a dialog and all that goes with managing a dialog.

At the moment, the only terminology is in the name of the script: MakeBooklet. Accommodating bleed and slug doesn't require an interface because bleed and slug are part of the InDesign interface. Your document has these settings; I can add them to the booklet. But creep and gap are extra to the InDesign document.

Dave

I fully agree -- it is a lot of time and effort, and I think it is completely reasonable to expect users to reimburse the author for these sorts of capabilities if they need them.

I think what Dave has been trying to say is that he doesn't want to invest the amount of time necessary to develop a full-blown imposition routine unless someone is going to pay for that.

I can see Harbs' scenario as being reasonably common, but there really is no reason to be all things to all people, at least not as a volunteer.

Just a thought on slugs/bleeds. If you limit the script to handling bleeds only, people who insist on having some slug area can easily increase the bleed on that side to encompass what would have been the slug. It all gets trimmed off in the end, so calling it one or the other doesn't really mean a lot, except to preview.

Peter

At 4:16 AM -0700 7/9/07, Dave Saunders wrote:
>...The minute I start supporting inner bleeds, I also have to support crop and bleed marks for that inner bleed...

Yup, but this buys a tremendous amount of flexibility for supporting Gap and Creep, perfect binding, adding slugs after imposition, and so on.

Stephen

Maybe they would, Harbs, but would they really want to do their own imposition using a booklet utility inside InDesign?

The main merit from the point of view of writing this script is that suppressing the bleeds produces a document that can then be managed using InDesign's own features. No crop marks or bleed marks need be added because the new document can use its own. The minute I start supporting inner bleeds, I also have to support crop and bleed marks for that inner bleed.

I see that as a lot of work for a low return on investment and an area where opinions would be all over the shop on what the "right" thing to do is.

So, I'm inclined to be hard nosed and say, if you want professional style imposition, get a professional imposition package and you'll be perfectly happy (except perhaps for the price). But if you want to do simple booklets, then that's where my script comes in.

Dave

Perhaps all is not lost. I could import each page twice, once with the bleed bounds and then with the slug bounds, and then I could create a rectangle the same size as the bleed bounds and use the pathfinder to knock a hole in the slug frame. That would work, I think. But this'll have to wait probably until next weekend before I turn to it again.

Dave

In the words of the immortal William Bendix, what a revolting development this is:

There are only three choices for the crop to value for importing pages:

Page bounding box
Bleed bounding box
Slug bounding box

I need

Bleed + Slug bounding box

to write the script the way I want it.

In view of that, the slug is going to have to go.

Grrr.

Dave

To think out loud some more: a reported problem with the existing version of the script is that it produces documents that have the same margin as the original document. I thought this would be easy to fix. All I'd have to do is add margin preferences to the new document definition, but this doesn't work.

And now I've taken a close look at the booklet document, even though it has facing pages switched off, the document is (on my machine at least) being created with facing pages on because the master spread has facing pages, even though the live pages are single-sided.

Aha! The solution is to create a temporary document preset that sets up the kind of document I need, use it to create the booklet document and then delete the preset.

Onwards and upwards.

Dave

I've been giving some thought to what it means for the MakeBooklet script to support bleeds and slugs. And there are two completely separate cases which could only be integrated into a single script by forcing the user to make a choice each time. This is caused by the famous "bleed at the binding" issue.

Bleed at the binding can only be supported by pushing the pages apart to allow the bleed to appear between the pages. Frankly, I'm not at all sure that there is much merit in doing this -- not because I don't believe bleed at the binding is important but because documents that require bleed at the binding usually require far more sophisticated impositions that the simple booklet imposition I'm providing with MakeBooklet.

There's also the issue of slug at the binding -- why would anyone do that? Who knows, but it is possible and for the script to support a slug on the other three sides, it can't ignore a slug at the binding in the original document.

Speaking of the original document, I do strongly believe that my script has no right at all to change the original document (other than insisting that it be in a saved, unmodified state -- and even then I give the user the chance to cancel). It would be so much easier to write this script if it could just set the binding slug and bleed to zero in the original document. But that I must not do.

So, I'm thinking that suporting bleed and slug in MakeBooklet requires that I create the booklet document with the same bleed and slug settings as the original document, except for at the binding because the booklet document doesn't bleed there -- it's not an edge of the paper. Then, when I place the pages I bring along the bleed and slug, and if any is present at the binding, I crop them out of existence.

So, having talked it through with myself, that's what I'll do for the next version of this MakeBooklet script. Like Bob and Peter, I am disappointed with the tiling issue for images. I understand from my contacts with Adobe that this is acknowledged to be a bug, but how soon they will fix it is anybody's guess. In the meantime, I do not see it as a big issue for people using MakeBooklet to do local printouts of documents they're sending off to a printer -- that's what I use it for; to make sure I provide the printer with a mock-up of how a document is supposed to be assembled when printed.

Dave

That is the first release. All the discussion of problems with tiling of images has dowsed my enthusiasm for the moment (not to mention that I've been busier than usual lately).

Dave