On "book" and "booklet" print modes

[sfriedberg 168]

While I have several tools which can do signature imposition, today I took a look to see if Affinity Publisher can do it, to avoid a post-export step.  Apparently the print mode "booklet" does signature imposition, although there does not seem to be any way to tell it how many sheets are supposed to be in one signature (an absolutely critical number for signature-based binding, like sewing).  Rather, it treats all the pages in the document as belonging to one however-many-sheets-are-required signature.  Nor does it seem able to manage anything more than a single fold (four pages per sheet total, front and back, each face divided by the fold into two pages) of the sheet.  Commercial offset printing pretty much starts at four folds (sixteen pages per sheet total, front and back, each face divided by the folds into eight pages).  However, for a self-described "booklet" mode, these restrictions seem reasonable.

"Book" mode is useful for perfect binding, but much less so for signature-based binding.  It treats each set of four consecutive pages as a single-sheet signature.  So you would fold each sheet separately, then glue them together at the spine.

I wrote this because the documentation for these features is something less than complete.  In fact, "book" mode is not even mentioned on the Publishing and Sharing > Print help page where the print dialog clearly displays that option.

[fde101 1,251]

The inability to control the number of signatures for Book mode has come up before in other threads.

For both modes the page count of the document must be a multiple of four.  That makes sense logically, but what might not be obvious is that the program doesn't simply append blank pages during the printing process to fill in to that multiple...

[sfriedberg 168]

Actually, when I first tried booklet mode, I deliberately started with a document of 33 pages.  3 additional blank pages were imposed during print in the proper places, without changing the page count in the document itselft.  So that does seem to work properly.

[fde101 1,251]

Interesting...  it wasn't always like that so they must have fixed it somewhere down the line and I missed that.

[Douglas Stinson 0]

I agree. The ability to print signatures would be most helpful! I know a number of people who make hand-made books that would find this feature very useful.