JamesCanning

I have posted about this before, likely some of you will remember it. Briefly, I'm trying to figure out how to lay out 4- 4x5 psges on 1x8x10 page. I don't want to use imposition software mainly because I don't understand it. Montax needs to import a pdf page that's already in a correct sequence, this latter pdf layout is what I'm trying to make in Affinity Publisher. No I'm not real skilled in this sort of job. I have attached an .afpub file that I think will show what I am trying to accomplish. This attached file is for the public domain story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and is already edited to remove double form feeds and extraneous. Addendum: my Canon MX870 does not do duplex printing, its supposed to but won't do so with Publisher documents. OK, can someone show me how to link the text boxes so as to print out a booklet in the correct sequence? I assume I need to print odd-pages-only and then even-pages only. impossible.afpub

old Bru, re your layout - it's for notebook style layouts. What about for pamphlet style layouts? Thank you, James

Hi people, I've mentioned this before re Publisher, but a long time ago. I never got a solution to the problem of subdividing an 8x10 paper pages into 4-4x5 pages and printing out the result so it can be cut in one dimension and after cutting I want to have double sided 4x8 pages that can be folded in half and fitted within or on top of each other to make a 4x5 booklet. I have decided its impossible. The problem of odd and even pages subdivided into paired 4x5 odd and even pages, feels like an experiment in 4th dimensional topology. I can't use imposition software afaik because its meant for larger paper sizes. Do you all think I'm barmy? 😂 James

Thank you all. I never realized I was using the incorrect affinity app for this! I'm embarrassed and blaming old age for this. :'-( Thank you anyway. You are each and every one a small beacon of brightness in these mysteries HAHA :-D James

I just updated Affinity Designer to 1.8.5.703. I haven't used Designer for quite a while. I need to know how the heck do I get the pages panel out where I can see it?? Thanks! James

Thank you very much, MikeW! I have to put together some stuff that's gotten kinda scattered, before we could try this. I'm surprised any body can do this 🙂 I gave up on it after a lot of effort. Too many things I didn't know, I was trying to learn it entirely on my own. One caveat is that I am profoundly deaf so that help videos are not much good. Would it be practical/possible for me to learn from an example of yours you might post or send me? My best example I worked hard on, is a 5x7 page size laid out on 8 1/2x11 paper booklet, listing all my passwords to everything. There's a lot of old stuff so it's fairly big.I don't feel free to send this out you understand! James

Mike, Hi! I'm not so sure I even want to revisit this. I hoped to find a general sort of answer that would let me layout pages (5x7, even 4x5) on A4 paper and print correctly on the standard desktop printer everyone has lying around. Such as my Canon MX870. I thought there would just be some general rules or plans I could work with. I don't think that's possible now, I mean you could apparently make up a routine for printing a specific document in book form, but would the layout be usable with other text sizes, images and so on? I think this would get too complicated for my simple little mind. :-) If I'm wrong about that I'd love to hear more about it. Don't want much, do I ;-) James

Gave up! Peter and Susan, I just now saw your replies to my old post. Thank you both very much. I am not following this topic any more because "other things have happened", that is I have lost interest after repeated failures, and am doing other things now. I wanted to make small books from text I find or make up. These would be on standard office size paper, A4, maybe folded into halves or quarters. I have learned bookbinding as a way to make small books from start to finish. I was stopped by the problem of getting the pages to print out in the right order, which does not look to be possible with whats available online. That's where I am now. Again, thank you! James

THANK both of you! Walt you're still rolling along answering everything. Good for you. More Walts are needed :-) James

Hi people. I haven't been here for a while, I hope all of you are still chugging along well. My problem is: I'm trying to replace a string of six asterisks with a paragraph return. I get the error: "<Invalid preceeding regular expression prior to repetition operator>". Why might that be? Thank you! James

Thanks, inspiredmac Actually I'm trying to learn how to do imposition myself. Not everything, just be able to apply it to small pamphlets/booklets that I make for myself. It's something new to learn, and more complicated than I thought 😕 . James

PaulEC and Callum, thank you for your replies. I will take you to heart and see what more I can do without grinding my brain with learning imposition. I am trying to learn too many new things at the same time. Callum, my booklets would be just like the instruction manuals that come with most small pieces of hardware. How-to, listings, definitions, all kinds of text bits. James

Hello, I want to make small reference booklets, for instance lists of passwords and like that. I want these booklets to be 1/4 of a letter size document, that is, 4.25" x 5.5". Sometimes twice that, half of a letter size. I had the impression I have to have imposition software, such as my 'Montax Imposition', but I'm finding it very difficult to learn (newbie). I'm wondering if the imposition software is even necessary. Any opinions? Thank you very much for reading this. James

Dan and Petar, thank you both very much. Sometimes even the way something is worded, can be helpful and informative, and I can use anything! I learned from these articles. I don't have Acrobat but I do have the two imposition softwares I mentioned, Montax and Bookmaker. These should have me ready to go and I need to find out many small details, such as your references discuss. I'm working on it on my own because of a personal interest that started with bookbinding. I didn't expect it to expand so much and so fast :-). Again, thank you. James

Hi there, people. I would sure like some advice here. Even though this is rather off topic in an Affinity group. I haven't been able to learn how to do impositions on my own, it seems to be too advanced a topic for me. I have access to both Devalipi Bookmaker and to Montax Imposer. I can't get started with either one because I'm too ignorant :-\ I'm stalled totally. What I want to do is impose pages on letter size paper, so as to make both 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 and 5 1/2 x 8 1/2. booklets. The imposed pages will be cut as necessary from the letter sized printouts. This is all I will be doing. I'm unsure if I'm even wording this correctly. I find very little info online on how to do this, and it comes too thick and fast for me to follow along. I need to add that I'm deaf so that multimedia is usually useless. Where it's captioned, it's difficult to watch the video and see and absorb the captioning at the same time. Is this question answered in specialized printing classes? I'll take this somewhere else if you say I should! Thanks for reading it anyway. James.desperate

I'm getting away from the topic a little, sorry. This started with a problem handling text, now I'm asking if people have heard of or used Montax Imposer? I have been mostly successful getting a good pdf from Affinity Publisher, now I need to do the imposition and Montax Imposer is what i have to work with. It can't be advertised by name here I guess. Is it hard to use :-/? Typical noob question. Thank you all who have responded so far. James

Hi people, Where does the document paper size come from, when one is setting up a new document? I have an image to help make sense out of my question. I'm trying to set up a pair of 5x7 or A5 images, on a sheet of letter ANSI A paper. This is a very long document that I want to print on both left and right text boxes on both sides of the paper. It's pretty much like a newspaper layout except for the sizes. Would it be better to use the "book" setting? I have attached a screencap of what I see after setting up the document in "new". I don't understand where the dimensions under "custom" came from. They are larger than expected, sometimes much larger. Any suggestions and clarification welcome! James

Howdy Walt, Right now I'm working on it myself. Maybe I have a discrepancy between text and printing setups. Not sure what that means myself :-/ and I'd like to try and clarify my understanding. Hold on a bit and I'll come back soon if and as necessary. James

Hi, Why should my imported text have its own text box size, different from the margins set in Affinity? The corners of the text boxes are marked with gray "x"s and the text is not selectable. The text layer is not marked "locked". Thank you, James

Hey guys, Thank you for the suggestions. I don't know if I want to do this enough to buy imposition software. I think I'll play around with the options in Publisher for a while longer. The other suggestions mentioned here are something i will keep around and try pretty soon. This is a bit of a hobby for me. MS Word can come pretty close to what I would like to do, as my friend showed me, I think I can do as well with Publisher, maybe. Anyway, thank you for your help! James

Part of the reason I asked about text flow was that I am trying to figure out how to handle signatures as they call them in bookbinding. I have settled on number of pages per signature and I can put them together fine when they are blank. But when they need to have a text content sequentially correct, the printing becomes really tough. Maybe something like print the signatures as N-page booklets? I've been researching this and it seems to be quite difficult to get right. Affinity Publisher may not be able to help much, I don't know yet. Anyone out there with a bit of experience? James

Nice people here too. James

Thanks again, Walt. So I'll be at it a while, with good direction from your responses so far. Thanks once more! I am really a newbie and shy about it :-/ James

Hi there Walt, Thank you for your rapid reply and understanding of my none-too-clear question. I have not yet been able to get what I am after, not exactly, I put this down to my general state of newbie-hood not getting the layout correctly. I believe the text continuation is working well. I now get a single 5x7 text page printing out in the middle of a sheet of A4 paper. I'm not sure if I was clear that I want to print on both sides of the paper This is for a bookbinding project for which I need to test my page layout skills. Hopefully I can print out A4 pages that are folded once along the short axis, and then sewn together along the fold. James

Howdy, I've been away from AfPub for some time, unfortunately. How soon we forget. :-( What I'm trying to do now is put a very long text document into printable form. I have it set up as facing pages in which the pages are 5-1/2 x 8-1/2. This is not that difficult to set up. What's giving me problems is setting up the text continuation between paper pages. The very first printed page is the right side of the first sheet of paper. Then it continues to the left side of the second sheet of paper, then the right side of the same sheet of paper, then the left of the next sheet etc. How do I set up the continuation into the left sides of the sheets of paper? I can't figure out how to close the link that has the document text going from right to left of the next sheet of paper. It won't work to have the right side of a page continue to the left side of the same page, it needs to drop to a new paper page. :-P James