Quarto Booklet Imposition on InDesign

[tl69634744]

Is there a way to do quarto imposition with InDesign (11x17)? I want to print four pages on one side (1,8,4,5), and four pages on the other side (2,3,6,7), and then fold twice in half.

I'm a teacher, not a book designer, so I'll only be sending this to the school's copy machine, which does print 11x17 double sided. This project is for a book history activity in which my students will be folding sheets and then stitching together their own quarto books, as it was done in the early days of print. I'd like to save the files in pdf as well to share with other teachers. The whole book contains 64 pages (so eight double-sided sheets).

I'm trying to find alternatives to designing each side of a sheet according to the diagram below, with 1,8, 7, 2 upside down. I currently (and perhaps mistakenly) designed each page independently on InDesign. In other words, I have the title page of the book as page 1, the second page of the book on page 2 and so on. (I stopped at page 8 when I realized Print Booklet didn't offer a save in pdf option or seem to offer printing in this format).

I'd be interested in downloading imposition plugins or purchasing inexpensive imposition software, but I'm not sure which would actually help me with this kind of booklet. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

[Derek Cross]

I suggest you experiment a bit first with some dummy pages before you go too far as the registration (alignment) of the back up my not be very good on an office printer.

You would normally print from a PDF not directly from InDesign.

You'll need two versions, one imposed for printing and one single continuous pages for circulating.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

InDesign's imposition utility (aka, Print Booklet) can't do a 4-up press sheet you show in your diagram (4 pages/side). It really only works for 2-up press sheet, like an 11x17 sheet for a 4-page flyer.

Suggestion: try PDF Toolbox by Callas Software, https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdftoolbox

There are other plug-ins/extensions you can buy, but Callas has some of the best industry tools on the market. I believe they have a trial download you can test.

[rob day]

This project is for a book history activity in which my students will be folding sheets and then stitching together their own quarto books, as it was done in the early days of print.

If you want understanding imposition to be part of the book project, you can make manual impositions by placing InDesign pages in another InDesign document. So here I have an 8-page reader document on the left and I'm placing its pages on an 11" x 17" doc—choosing Show Options from the place dialog lets me choose the page to be placed. After the place I can rotate the pages as needed.

Once the imposition doc is setup, I can make changes to the reader doc and simply update the link in the imposition doc.

[tl69634744 · Accepted solution]

Hi all,

Thank you for the feedback. I was able to export the InDesign file to pdf and then use the free software, ImpositionOnline, to create the sheets in 4-up saddle stitch. ImpositionOnline doesn't offer a lot of flexibility, but it does the imposition that I need for this project perfectly!

I love the idea of having students do some imposition themselves in InDesign, but unfortunately, not many have the software on their computers.

Thanks again for the help.