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Stuartr414
New Participant
July 6, 2018
Question

Printing multiple PDF pages on a roll, while preserving size (i.e. not scaling)

  • July 6, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1958 views

Hello, I am a photographer making an artist book on a high end Japanese paper. The paper comes only in 17" and 44" rolls. My sheet size is 54x31cm, which fits well with two pages per sheet on a 44" roll. I need to print at this exact size for the binding to work, and I am using an Epson p9000 printer which requires a 15mm border on top and bottom, so if I set the proper sheet size, the Adobe Scaling will adjust the sizing incorrectly.

I can print single sheets just fine by turning off the scaling, but when I select "multiple" in the printing dialog, the document seems to be automatically scaled to fit the paper size, with no possibility for user choice. I can do exactly what I would like to do with images in Lightroom (printing in two columns, basically), but it does not seem possible in Acrobat. Does anyone have any advice? I suppose I could try to render them as images and print through lightroom, but I would prefer to stay in Acrobat if possible.

Thanks very much!

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1 reply

Abambo
Abambo
Community Expert
July 8, 2018

Acrobat does not scale except you say so. There is either a faulty settings in Acrobat or a driver doing additional scaling. I am now with my iPad so I do not have the print dialogue before me, but multiple does not do what you think it is doing. It’s simply not designed as an imposition tool.

You would need an imposition plug-in for achieving your goal. There exist professional printing solutions costing quite some money. The ”poor man’s” imposition tool is either Indesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (in your case, Photoshop may be quite adapted).

We use Indesign for all “design” imposition (business cards, name plates or things like that) and Photoshop for photos (passport and visa pictures). For ”occasional” imposition jobs, this is most adequate. A professional printer with hundreds of jobs a week would, however, loose his time with our solution and he would lack all the support and automation his tools provide for additional fees.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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    Stuartr414Author
    New Participant
    July 8, 2018

    Thank you Abambo, but Acrobat is indeed scaling the image in the multiple setting. That is exactly the issue. This is happening before the driver. It may not be designed as an imposition tool, but since it does offer a setting for multiple images on a roll, it would be nice if there were more options to control how those images were imposed, rather than simply fitting to paper, it would be nice if you could tell it to retain the actual size of the image. Given the cost of the Adobe suite, it is quite a shame that one needs to buy expensive additional plugins just to allow it to print properly.

    In the meantime there does not seem to be any practical way around this, so I am going to do my best to saw the roll in half...in doing so I can create a custom roll size and just print one at a time across the half roll lengths. Not ideal, but probably quicker than waiting for this feature to be added!

    (And P.S., I am a professional printer, but I print exhibitions, not business graphics, so I am rarely printing from PDF...I print nearly exclusively from Lightroom and Photoshop, nearly always TIFFS, JPEGS and RAW files).

    Abambo
    Abambo
    Community Expert
    July 9, 2018

    Sorry for the confusion, but yes, you are right. The intend of print multiple is to print multiple pages on one sheet and yes, they scale and yes it cannot be controled or disabled. This is not a bug but a design choice of Adobe. The only mode where you control the scaling is by using the size option. That does not allow you imposing. There is probably no intend of Adobe to change that, as it behaves like that since I use Acrobat.

    You can use Photoshop actions to impose in a semi automatic way. You may also use Indesign or Illustrator to do semi automatic imposition. This way you create a temporary file containing the 2 or more images on a sheet with the exact print size.

    Or you need to acquire an imposition plug-in. That may or may not being profitable for you.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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