Fix CS3's Print Booklet !!

Report · May 05, 2007

The Print Booklet feature in InDesign CS3 is a step backward!

CS2's InBooklet could create a new document. I BADLY need that feature, as I must print odd spreads in landscape mode, but even numbered spreads in reverse landscape mode.

Having to export/print to PDF, then rotate the pages in Acrobat and print from there is unnecessarily cumbersome.

Report · Jul 02, 2007

> I gather that you don't use footnotes and you don't care much about numbered lists.

Or objects crossing the spine.

Bob

Report · Jul 02, 2007

This is all hypothetical, but the numbering problem could've been fixed by having it convert to text beforehand (maybe footnotes, too).

Report · Jul 02, 2007

"It's just too bad that Adobe Team didn't keep it."

Not like that was an option. Quark bought the company that made InBooklet....

T

Report · Jul 03, 2007

...and promptly killed all their plug-ins for Adobe products, including InBooklet.

'Twas a real shame. ALAP was a great company, run by people who cared about their customers. Quark, on the other hand....

Report · Jul 03, 2007

To Dave, messsage #24

I tried to download your script again, to see if you had made any changes. But this time I got only a 1307 byte file. Have you removed it from your site?

Myrna Larson

Report · Jul 03, 2007

That's the size of the file. Unzip it.

Dave

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Can anyone help me please.
How do I get Inbooklet, I want to print both sides of a page, I have a duplex printer.

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Jacki,

InBooklet SE shipped as part of InDesign CS2 and in the Pagemaker plugins for CS1. If you didn't get it either of those ways, you're out of luck. Quark acquired ALAP, the plugin manufacturer and promptly took it off the market.

In CS3 the booklet functionality has been replaced with Print Booklet, which you will find under the File menu.

That said, you need to tell us a lot more than you want to prints both sides of a page on your duplex printer. You only need booklet imposition if you have a multipage document that you want to convert to two-page spreads and bind. The actual duplexing is handled in the printer driver.

Peter

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Thanks Peter, found in Inbooklet but could not fathom it out.

When I try to print in duplex it comes back and tells me I cannot do this. I have only just loaded the software so trying to find out something about it. I print a lot of newsletter for the various charities I work with and want to be able to do this in InDesign now I have it.

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Jacki,

InBooklet organizes the pages into "printer's spreads" putting the front and back pages together and so forth. It does not set up the printer -- that's up to you.

For example, if you set up your newsletter as 8.5 x 11 facing pages (which is typically what you want to do for a lettersize newsletter that will be folded and mailed), InBooklet will "impose" 11 x 17 spreads (note that you need to work in multiples of 4 pages for this style of binding which is called two-up saddle-stitch) onto a new page size of 11 x 17. You must select the correct page size, positioning (centered) and orientation in the print dialog, which will appear after you click the print button. Printing on a sheet that is exactly twice the size of your page means you can't have any printer marks and you should set the margins in InBooklet to zero.

To get your printer to duplex you will need to click the "setup" button in the lower left of the print dialog and ignore the warning if it appears about making settings in the dialog. This will put you in another dialog which is the printer driver settings setup. Each of these is different, depending on the printer, so I can't tell you what to do from here, exactly, but if you look around you'll find the duplex settings. Typically you would want to set the duplex to "short edge binding" or "top to top" but you should run a test print and if it's wrong just change the setting.

Peter

Report · Jul 06, 2007

> To get your printer to duplex you will need to click the "setup" button in the lower left of the print dialog

IIRC, on the Mac that button is labeled printer.

Bob

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Good Thinking ,Bob. I forgot this is a platform-neutral forum and she didn't say which one she uses. :)

Report · Jul 06, 2007

Reply to Dave's message, #30, re the download:

It must have been a bad download. I did try to unzip it, but got an error. After posting the message here, I downloaded again, and this one unzipped OK. No changes since the first release, right?

Report · Jul 06, 2007

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

Report · Jul 08, 2007

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

Report · Jul 08, 2007

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

Report · Jul 08, 2007

To make this a little less of a monolog... ;)

If someone has inside bleeds set up on their original doc, wouldn't they
also want them in their booklet? I, for example: if I were printing a
spiral bound book on my color copier, would want the inner bleeds
preserved. If I were printing a saddle stitched book, I would not have
inner bleeds set up. If I was doing a perfect bound book, I could go
either way, but I don't see the merit of not preserving the inner bleeds.

Report · Jul 08, 2007

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

Report · Jul 08, 2007

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

Report · Jul 09, 2007

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

Report · Jul 09, 2007

 Maybe they would, Harbs, but would they really want to do their own

imposition using a booklet utility inside InDesign?

>

I can't speak for everyone, but I personally like printing to low end
machinery straight from 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.

>
>
That makes sense. But why didn't you do the imposition using facing
pages (similar to buildbooklet)? That way all this stuff would be
handled by the program...

 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.

>
Definitely a lot of logic there! For those that want to do advanced
imposition straight from InDesign, they can even pay for a more advanced
script! ;)

[Edit} the formatting on this post, got pretty mangled. I tried sending it earlier today, and it didn't go. (I'm not sure if it was my connection, or the forum server -- I was sending from the hospital. -- My wife gave birth to twin boys 🙂 ) Either way. I tried fixeing it with pre tags, but it just made a bigger mess. Oh well!

Report · Jul 09, 2007

> My wife gave birth to twin boys :)

Mazel Tov!

Bob

Report · Jul 09, 2007

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

Report · Jul 09, 2007

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

Report · Jul 09, 2007

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.