Help With Setup To Create a Little Game Manual

[Dijita]

For fun, I want to create some game manuals for some of my Nintendo Switch games. I have experience using Illustrator software but not Publisher software.

I'm very confused with the setup process. I am going to print on Letter Sized paper. The game manuals size will be roughly 4.25" x 3" but I guess the spread size (sorry for incorrect lingo) would be 8.5" x 3".

Ideally, I would like to maximize the use of the paper. Thus, I want to have each page on the manual duplicated on one page of the letter size paper.

I will be manually cutting the pages after print so I would want some kind of cut marks on the printed pages.

Any advice on how I set this up?

Do I start my document size at 8.5" x 11"? Or is it better to just print one copy of the manual on each sheet of letter paper, thus setting up my document as 8.5" x 3", even though I'll be printing on letter paper?

I hope I was able to describe the situation so that it gives a clear indication of what I'm trying to do. Any suggestions or videos you can point me to, would be greatly appreciated.

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums.

Unless I have misunderstood your requirements, you could set-up your pages like I have done in my attached example.
The grey areas are the ‘pages’ and the dotted lines – just outside of the grey areas – represent the ‘bleed’.
To cut the pages out you can cut along the purple lines – from edge to edge of the purple lines, not to the outside of the ‘pages’ or the physical paper – in the order shown by the numbers. The dotted purple line is the fold.

Double-check the areas you use for your ‘pages’ and 'bleed' to make sure they are exactly right before you start.

That’s not the difficult part though.

One difficulty could be getting the ‘pages’ on each side of the paper to line-up. Unless your printer is very accurate in feeding the same sheet back in (even with duplex printing) you could have problems getting the back and front lined up. Lots of testing may be required. Try printing a double-sided document where you have a simple rectangle in the same place on both sides of the paper and see how well they line-up. If they are nowhere near then you could have major problems later on. If you can’t get this right then any further work could probably be wasted.

Another difficulty will be figuring out which page goes where in your manual and putting it in the correct ‘page’ in your document. This will have to be determined by how many pages you have and I would recommend doing lots of testing – cutting simple test pages and experimenting – to figure it out. This will be complicated but not impossible. See this article for some basic starter information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition

You may find that this could be way more difficult, time-consuming, and awkward than you want it to be, but good luck.

 

Edited January 27, 2020 by GarryP