Book PDF export margin management issues

[cwoodhou]

Although the latest Publisher beta is more stable than its predecessor, I'm having difficulty with outputting books as PDF.
In V 1.0 - books simply concatenated the chapters and if one had asymmetrical L/R page margins, you had to go through each page and shift content L/R if the previous chapter had an odd number of pages. 
In V 2 - the chapters are kept separate - but there is now no way to re-align the text frames/placements to the displaced margins - and the PDF output simply retains the original chapter layout - so the PDF spread has random L/R margins, depending on whether the preceding chapters had an odd/even page count.

In InDesign - when you assembled a book, it took care of this and all the left / right hand pages in the final book PDF output had consistent inner and outer margins.

[MikeTO]

Hi, v1 did not have Books and Chapters. I believe you're talking about the Sections feature which is still present in v2 but separate from the Books feature.

IMO, the most logical setting for Stray Pages with a facing pages document is to have both Merge and Pad enabled - without Pad you'll wind up with single page spreads in the exported PDF so it needs to be enabled. However, I don't find that Merge actually merges when I think it should so I recommend checking the output and adjusting your chapter files accordingly. i.e., if chapter 1 ends with a blank right page and chapter 2 starts on a right page, Publisher will pad before chapter 2 leaving me with 2 blank pages which isn't what I want in my book. I think it should pad before merging but it might be merging and then padding.

[cwoodhou]

Thanks Mike - yes, you are right, V1 had sections. I haven't come across Pad and Merge - I will take a look. I don't really want to simply add blank pages though.

[cwoodhou]

Many thanks Mike - that did it - the trick is to export as pages rather than chapters with pad and merge enabled. The margins seem consistent now!

[cwoodhou]

Unfortunately I was too quick to think it had fully corrected the issue.

Pad adds blank pages, which causes the chapters to start on the same side. I do not need these and I just noticed that outputting PDF as pages, rather than chapters, causes the page numbers to skip over the non-printed padding pages. I checked further - I still have the wrong inner and outer margins in some cases.

back to the drawing board

 

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, cwoodhou said:

Unfortunately I was too quick to think it had fully corrected the issue.

Pad adds blank pages, which causes the chapters to start on the same side. I do not need these and I just noticed that outputting PDF as pages, rather than chapters, causes the page numbers to skip over the non-printed padding pages. I checked further - I still have the wrong inner and outer margins in some cases.

AFAIK Publisher's Books feature doesn't support chapters that always or sometimes start on the left side of a page.

Even for chapters that always start on the right side, you must manually remove trailing blank pages at the end of a chapter or you will end up with two blank pages since Merge wasn't designed to handle this. Please see these posts: