Creating a Center page spread in Publisher

[Aphotik]

Hello all 🙂

Apologies for asking what must be a fairly simple question but I have searched and searched and I can't even seem to find the appropriate search terms that might put me on the right track.

I am making an A4 photobook and because it is not my first, I want to be a bit more ambitious with the design and one of the features I want is a central spread where one 16:9 landscape photo is spread out across the entire page exactly like an old school centrefold. The problem is that I assume a) that the PDF that affinity generates has some default settings with regards to bleed and gutters and b) that I will need to alter those default values in order to ensure that the image I have dragged and dropped into the document doesn't have a few mm shaved out of the middle of it.

I know that you can set the spread characteristics for an entire document when you open the file, but I don't want to do that... I just want to (I think) eliminate the gutter from the central pages so that the image flows from one page to the other. Is there any way to alter that information but only for the central spread? I've included an image so that you can see the effect that I'm talking about.

 

Many thanks!

 

 

[thomaso]

Hi @Aphotik,
welcome to the Affinity Forums!

38 minutes ago, Aphotik said:

The problem is that I assume a) that the PDF that affinity generates has some default settings with regards to bleed and gutters and b) that I will need to alter those default values in order to ensure that the image I have dragged and dropped into the document doesn't have a few mm shaved out of the middle of it.

You can't influence or adjust the bleed for certain pages or spreads selectively. If I understand right you want to get the spread in the centre of your book printed as a single page but not as an imposed combination of a left + right page? Technically it would be possible but would require additional effort in the entire process to hande this centre spread differently and separated from the rest of the book … and this might not be worth the extra costs.

Another production workflow for the entire book might be an option: It prints the spreads without imposition (from a PDF that was exported as spreads, not single pages) and prints 1-sided only (without the back side of each sheet). Each resulting sheet gets folded in its centre + glued at its backside with the following or previous page. So page 1 gets glued with page 2, page 3 with 4 etc. This way you don't have any bleed or cut in the centre of each spread because each spread is produced as a folded sheet in the full size of 2 pages. – Common names are "flat binding" | "lay-flat binding" | "leporello binding". Nowadays various (online) (photo-)book print services offer this choice.

[Oufti]

4 hours ago, Aphotik said:

The problem is that I assume a) that the PDF that affinity generates has some default settings with regards to bleed and gutters and b) that I will need to alter those default values in order to ensure that the image I have dragged and dropped into the document doesn't have a few mm shaved out of the middle of it.

I know that you can set the spread characteristics for an entire document when you open the file, but I don't want to do that...

Welcome @Aphotik!
About your assumptions : 

a) & b) For a document laid out as spreads (double pages) and exported as single pages — so that the printer can do the imposition as he wants —, default settings for bleed in Affinity are that the inner fold has no bleed.
Printer's imposition software will always set a left page flush to a right one, thus no page will never be trimmed in the inner fold,  which means there is no need for bleed there — except when the imposition software takes into account the thickness of the book's signatures, or for spiral binding and the like. But, as you are actually printing on a central sheet, the two pages will be printed at once and your photo will never be at risk to be cropped or enlarged in its center. 

I don't know why you don't want to use a double pages document? That would be the obvious way of achieving your goal. 

[Aphotik]

20 hours ago, thomaso said:

Hi @Aphotik,
welcome to the Affinity Forums!

You can't influence or adjust the bleed for certain pages or spreads selectively. If I understand right you want to get the spread in the centre of your book printed as a single page but not as an imposed combination of a left + right page? Technically it would be possible but would require additional effort in the entire process to hande this centre spread differently and separated from the rest of the book … and this might not be worth the extra costs.

Another production workflow for the entire book might be an option: It prints the spreads without imposition (from a PDF that was exported as spreads, not single pages) and prints 1-sided only (without the back side of each sheet). Each resulting sheet gets folded in its centre + glued at its backside with the following or previous page. So page 1 gets glued with page 2, page 3 with 4 etc. This way you don't have any bleed or cut in the centre of each spread because each spread is produced as a folded sheet in the full size of 2 pages. – Common names are "flat binding" | "lay-flat binding" | "leporello binding". Nowadays various (online) (photo-)book print services offer this choice.

Thank you Thomaso,

I think that type of book-construction is ideal for this kind of project but it's a touch above my budget. Maybe one day!

[Aphotik]

16 hours ago, Oufti said:

I don't know why you don't want to use a double pages document? That would be the obvious way of achieving your goal. 

Thanks for the response Oufti, that is the information I was looking for. I was conscious that when you do 1 page = 1 picture, you don't notice if a couple of mm get shaved off and I didn't want to assume that nothing was being shaved. I will discuss this with the printer when I submit but if you tell me that Affinity doesn't assume a few additional 'invisible' mm between pages then that addresses my concern. Thank you ❤️

Purely out of interest, as I am still very much learning the language, what do you mean by a "double pages document"? The affinity file I am working with is already organised as a series of double-page spreads

[thomaso]

18 hours ago, Oufti said:

default settings for bleed in Affinity are that the inner fold has no bleed

Really? To me in V1 the default "Press Ready" preset (e.g. A4) has 3 mm bleed at all four edges in a facing-paged document. This makes sense, imho, because the print service may ignore this area in the imposition process easier than creating this for an exported PDF which lacks the inner bleed.

1 hour ago, Aphotik said:

Purely out of interest, as I am still very much learning the language, what do you mean by a "double pages document"? The affinity file I am working with is already organised as a series of double-page spreads

Your document setup is fine. In fact, this layout page arrangement is particularly useful (-> necessary) when layout objects are placed across the spine of a book and appear on the left and right pages of a spread, regardless of whether it is the middle spread of a book or another spread.

There are various terms around, even within Affinity: while its document setup says "facing pages" its Export options say "spreads" when talking about double-pages. It may be even more confusing in other languages, for instance the German version says "Layoutseiten" instead of "Druckbögen" (= "Spreads") although all single pages in a single-paged-document are "layout pages", too.

[Oufti]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

Really? To me in V1 the default "Press Ready" preset (e.g. A4) has 3 mm bleed at all four edges in a facing-paged document. This makes sense, imho, because the print service may ignore this area in the imposition process easier than creating this for an exported PDF which lacks the inner bleed.

Thank you @thomaso for this correction. I was stupid. Doing something else, I forgot to re-enable the Include bleed button on export…

(But @Aphotik, it doesn't change my conclusion, similar to thomaso's: a document laid out as spreads seems to be the best approach for this project. — And if, as proclaimed, you restrict yourself to only place double pages pictures on the central spread of a book, you'll never have any problem, anyway. )