InDesign CS5 - printing booklets with creep

As folks here are sharing with you, you can pretty much forget about using fine cross-bleeds on your spreads, because:

1) Typical office and home office laser/inkjet printers can't hold the fine registration to maintain a 3mm bleed. and

2) Bleeds across spreads typically result in the white bar you're seeing (at a little better than 3mm a side) because the "bleed" is read as an overlap on each side of the printer's spread done directly through InDesign. Better to set the job up with no bleed butting precisely up to the inside margin to make things possible.

Also, as the previous commenters have offered, if you're going to a commercial printer it's easier to leave these issues to them. They have the tools and techniques to handle the exacting overlapping bleeds and precise registration you're looking for when you're doing saddle-stitched books.

But if you're determined to do this yourself, or forced to do it with the resources you have at hand, it's not impossible to knock these out on your own, with high quality. It takes a lot of work -- and a fair amount of waste -- to do it, but it is possible. I do it periodically to produce my booklet/portfolio and my course catalog, with a lot of effort and a fair amount of waste. With discipline and demanding quality control, it is possible to do this yourself.

For a good outline of what the process takes, I'd suggest you look at my response in this comment thread:

Printing Front to Back

And for the pitfalls and complications, check out my response in this one:

print multiple pocket size pages as booklet on A4 paper

Between the two, you'll get good insight on whether it's worth the effort to try this act alone. To put it in simple terms, it ain't easy. And there will be waste. But it is possible.

Good luck,

Randy

Just to add, if your document has facing pages – such as a book or booklet – you don't add bleed to the inner edges, (though you would normally output your PDF as single pages for the printer to impose).

Don't use Print to PFR for producing the PDF, normally use the InDesign Acrobat PDF Presets.

Don't expect to be able to produce registered (aligned) backed-up booklets on your office desk-top printer, use it for proofing only.

Printing booklet from InDesign feature is pretty basic. You, as a designer, are not supposed to do an imposition yourself. Leave that headache for printer.

https://indesignsecrets.com/creating-pdf-indesigns-print-booklet-feature.php

UPDATE:

Also there's a paid plugin ID Imposer.

Here's extraction from it's description:

============

IDImposer is an imposition Extension for Adobe InDesign. It takes your InDesign document and prepares it

for printing, by creating a new InDesign document using step-and-repeat, saddle stitched, perfect bound, N

Up, cut stack, and more layout options

Requirements: 

=============

InDesign CS 5.0, 5.5, or 6.0, for Mac OS X or Windows.