Making two-sided half-fold stand up cards with Publisher

[Print Monkey]

I'm trying to figure out the best way to make letter-size half-fold stand up cards in Publisher. By this I mean the common situation where you take a letter size sheet or similar and fold it in half so it's shaped like a little tent, then stand it up on a table to use as a seating label or, in my case, as a reminder of task/agenda type bullet points or game/exercise rules, etc.

The problem is that I can't seem to find a way with Publisher to make this work very nicely. Currently I have a master spread that looks like this:

But I can only get this by creating a master spread with "facing pages" and rotating the text frame in the top page upside down. Then i can't view the pages as individual pages and even if I did then half of them would be upside-down.

What I would like to be able to do is:

1) Have a master portrait spread, say 8.5x11", where I can rotate entire landscape 8.5x5.5" pages whichever way is needed.

2) View individual landscape 8.5x5.5" pages in their correct right-side-up orientation.

3) Have those pages properly mapped to the spread and printed at the correct orientation for the fold(s).

Let me know if I'm missing anything but right now I can seem to find any way to get arbitrary orientations on "facing" pages for arbitrary folding schemes without having to type upside down or rotate my view all the time.

 

[Old Bruce]

Seeing as I own Designer I woud use Symbols for the back (and perhaps the front as well). Just print Page 2. The "Back page" symbol is rotated 180 degrees on page 2 and is placed on the top.

 

[Print Monkey]

Ok thanks, but I was hoping to find some sort of arbitrary way to define how spreads are composed for other reasons.... Any features or plans?

[MickRose]

Hi @Print Monkey On the specific tent card question why not just use a Master Page with the top text frame rotating 180 degrees as required (for editing or outputing). There is no need to use spreads. Or am I misunderstanding the question?

[David in Яuislip]

I've probably misunderstood and this proposal does need Photo but......

[Hangman]

Hi @Print Monkey,

In Publisher create two, Single Page (not spreads), 8.5" x 11" Master pages, Master A with the text the right way round, Master B with the upper text rotated 180°.

• Add all the required text to your Publisher pages using Master A as the applied Master Page.
• Once complete simply select all the pages in your Publisher document and apply Master B.
• If you need to make any edits to individual pages, re-apply Master A to the respective page, make your text edits and then re-apply Master B

 

[Mark Daniel]

I think the 'proper' way to do this would be just to design individual 8.5x5.5" pages, output them to PDF then have the printer do the imposition but if you're doing it yourself here are a couple of ideas I've thought of

If it's only a couple of designs I'd be tempted to abuse masters and do it like this

* New document - Facing pages, Arrange Vertically, Start at Top, 2 Pages
* Create a double page master called 'Combined'
* Create two single masters called 'Top' and 'Bottom'
* (Optionally create a third called 'Shared' and apply it to both Top and Bottom)
* Apply Top and Bottom to the respective halves of Combined.
* Switch to 'Combined' Select 'Top' in the layers panel and rotate it 180 degrees using the buttons or transform page
* Apply 'Combined' to document pages 1 and 2
* Do all your design work directly on the Top and Bottom master pages which are the right way up
* Export or Print the document pages
* Create a new document or new pairs of masters for each design

This could potentially be combined with Data Merge to merge in the body text for the cards

An alternative approach if you're doing many designs might be 
* Create document with single (non facing) landscape pages for all your fronts and backs on alternate pages - Save it as 'Faces'.
* Create another document, with a single portrait page for the full paper size make sure it's 'Prefer Linked'
* Add a picture frame to the top and bottom halves of the document page
* Rotate the top picture frame by 180 degrees
* File -> Place and select your first document
* In the place panel expand the file and select all the individual pages (Select the first, Command A) 
* Click in the first picture frame - It will place consecutive pages in consecutive frames creating new pages automatically.
* Save as 'Imposition', Print/Export from this file. If you make changes to the original faces, just make sure you update the linked file in Resource Manager
* Just watch out as the number of pages in your imposition document won't grow automatically if you add pages to the Faces document.

 

 

Hope some of those ideas help,

Mark

 

[Print Monkey]

Thanks a lot for the ideas @Mark Daniel and @Hangman. I will experiment with these and see what I can do. Right now I'm just printing off a few of these on a laser printer but I would like to know how to set up for larger numbers so will experiment with Mark's suggestions. (I haven't used page layout programs much and have mostly used photo editors and vector drawing programs so some of the ways of doing things in page layout software don't occur to me immediately.)

[thomaso]

Regardless of your choice of the various layout / spread / master options: In APub you also can rotate the view only, e.g. for easier editing of the 180º rotated page content. Useful if your document contains several layouts (pages) since this feature rotates the entire document with all pages at once.

This way you also could use spreads in horizontal orientation + rotate the view either left or right to edit the according pages.

[Print Monkey]

Thanks. That feature I had found already. It is a good feature to have available.