Page imposition and CS5

This is how I work around this.

1. Finish my layout in inDesign CS5.

2. Select print booklet and choose print to file then.

3. Select Acrobat as my printer.

Ta Da ! I passed the Color press test !

Sorry about mispelling Dave's last name, Always liked to read his explanations, I do remember when he first started but don't come here much anymore.

No complaints with Quite Imposing, none. It's fast and does tricks. I mentioned the minor margin shift because Peter asked another to describe the same symptom and I thought maybe it would help.

Today I had a few spare minutes and an 48-page document, so I thought I'd try a little experiment:

1. Export to PDF. No resizing or margins or bleeds, just the pages.

2. In the Page range box, enter 48,1,2,47,46,3,4,45,44,5,6,43 (and then it got boring)

3. The exported PDF now contains the correct order for an 48-page booklet -- at least, for the first few sheets it did

4. Open in Acrobat, print to my HP, which can print 2-up and double-sided.

5. Take stack, fold in half. Hey! It's a booklet!

The "hard" part is actually calculating the order in which to export the pages. There might also be a max limit for the page range input string, but I'd have ta test that. It's "hard", rather than plain 'hard', because I can do this stuff off the top of me head, but if I need it I could write a simple script for it.

"

Wrong. InBooklet shipped with CS2 which was the third version of InDesign to support transparency.

You are wrong. And if it was that big a deal there would be more than just the few people here complaining.

This was an intention move by Apple. Complain to them.

Bob

"

Item #1: Yep, my mistake.

Item #2: This IS a fairly big deal: We have 6 participants in this discussion, and at least 2 of us are pining for change. That's 1/3 of this discussion.

Item #3: Explain that "This was an intention(al) move by Apple." and not some bug.

"...If saving a new doc from Print Booklet was as easy as you think, it would be there."

Good point. Yet to then take this data and do something that seems even more complicated ...such as rearranging, then transfering, this data to a print device...? Remember, InDesign is very smart. It'll even reformat your layout if you simply change the margins. From my lowly viewpoint it seems we're just rearranging pages, duplicating objects that share both pages, then flipping the front cover. A tall order? I'm thinkin' not.

As for InBooklet's short comings, remember ... that was a product from the past. Back then soft shadows and transparency was a glint in a designer's eye.

So far I still think Adobe simply didn't think this option through. Could be wrong.

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As for Snow Leapard killing Print to PDF, Snow's been out for quite a while. Was there no workaround Adobe could find?

You're talking as if "simple" imposition is a hard thing for InDesign to do ...that it is bloat and unreasonable to have InDesign do this natively so that one could save print spreads to PDF and sent to clients to print on their color copiers. Simple imposition is, well, "simple". I have successfully gone to InDesign's pages panel and manually moved 8 page booklets ...sorry ...books, to make printer speads that I can then save to PDF. But this is very time consuming. If this is simple enough to do manually, why can't InDesign do the page moving without taking it to a print device?

Simple imposition IS NOT software rocket science (note the size of "MakeBooklet" script). We should not have to rely on a 3rd party script that may, or may not work with updated versions of our software and OS.

I began with PageMaker. My goal was to save the world. Gandhi said we needed a press. Then along came InDesign. Verily, I say unto you, I resisted, then gave in. Now I live in an age when the shuttle cannot be reproduced and Adobe uses boring shaded squares rather than original digital art, to announce its opening. Lowly Apprentice I made friends with, even helped with testing new issues. Now we are in a fix, I for example am experiencing technical glitches regarding simplicity which has no method to track down. This idea that the professional corporate printer is all that counts is in foul territory. Adobe creative suite is awesome but the time has come for a heads up. Great programmers have caught me putting Adobe on my son's computer so he learns PhotoShop instead of GIMP, while, at the same time, I still have the old versions at schools, where many students are learning to use Adobe products. Hmm. I'm sensing lack of corporate priority focus and this thread has grown to convince me I'm correct. Really, book imposition should be part of InDesign. And, please, do not use the word "booklet."

Cordially,

Garrett

First, let me say that I've been using InDesign for production work since 2001, and have lost at most two files to corruption. This is head and shoulders above the reliabilty of any other layout application I've used, including Quark Xpress. I fail to see how having an imposed copy of a file is more useful as a backup than having an unimposed backup. You can make an imposed PDF for archiving, too, though it is certainly a chore in Snow Leopard (see http://indesignsecrets.com/acrobats-adobe-pdf-printer-replaced-in-snow-leopard.php and be sure to read throught the comments where the required information for booklets is buried).

If your imposition needs are simple (two-up saddle-stitch, no creep) there are free scripts that can handle it by creating a shuffled document from your original while leaving the original intact. You then export or print spreads from the new file.

Your InDesign CS2 shipped with a Lite version of InBooklet, before ALAP was aquired by Quark and they removed it from the market. While Inbooklet would save a new file (which Print Booklet will not), it was know to be fairly buggy and unreliable with certain types of content, notably numbered lists (and some other stuff I no longer remember).

On behalf of Adobe, InCopy has absolutely nothing to do with imposition. I obviously don't know who the sales rep is, but he or she obviously doesn't know what they are talking about. If that sales rep is an Adobe employee and you have the name, I'd love to get it from you off-forum so that we could send the individual off to the appropriate re-education gulag! 

In terms of imposition, this particular topic has been discussed ad nauseum on these forums. I'll try to encapsulate Adobe's position and for that matter, the position of the vast majority of the 21st Century print industry on this topic.

Other than for the simplest of imposition jobs such as a four page booklet of 8.5"x11" pages printed on a two-sided 11"x17" sheet of paper (which is easy to layout without any special tools), imposition is best left to a very late stage in the print workflow, typically immediately before platemaking or as part of the submission to a digital press. Why? Imposition is most often device, substrate, and binding method specific as well as print business specific. Proper imposition is not something that a hack on top of a page layout program is properly going to handle.

Most modern PDF workflow systems and digital presses have imposition features built-in that account for the paper types, sizes, and business needs of the print business itself. Furthermore, it is generally recognized that page imposition is part of the service provided by the printer. If you are using a printer who requires you to do the imposition or proposes to charge you extra for this service, you should start asking some very serious questions about the professionalism of the printer and their longer term viability in the marketplace.

Page layout programs such as InDesign and QuarkXPress as well as word processors such as Microsoft Word should create documents and subsequent PDF files generated from same in logical page order, not in printer spreads. The PDF files should be imposed by the PDF workflow system or the digital printer per the appropriate final product needs, printing conditions, and print device optimizations (you'd be amazed to find out how many printers optimize press usage by printing multiple jobs at one time with one set of plates via clever use of sophisticated page imposition software). In the worst case, those logical page order PDF files could be imposed in Acrobat via third party plug-ins such as Quite Imposing that you cited.

Frankly speaking, doing page imposition is really 1990's-era workflow practice that most modern professionals are trying to discourage. As such, don't expect to see any further "improvements" in this area from Adobe.

You seemed to indicate that you saw page imposition as some type of insurance against corruption of your InDesign documents. If you are really having such problems, you should seriously check you own operating conditions. We hear of various types of issues associated with use of InDesign, but document file corruption is not a very common issue (it was with PageMaker, but not InDesign). Quite a bit of work went into assuring minimal possibility of such corruption going all the way back to InDesign 1.0! If you are encountering significant problems in this area, it may be symptomatic of some other problems including hardware issues or unusual network file storage issues (including unreliable network connections). Doing imposition in InDesign really doesn't solve any issues there.

          - Dov