Printing a spread from Publisher

[RobinMcL]

Hello,

How do you print a spread directly from Publisher?

Can someone give me a good reference to printing, one that covers printing spread, doing imposition, how selecting specific attributes (like bleed or no bleed, trim marks etc.) affects the (seemingly) endless options on the Export to PDF drop down etc. I am having a very hard time printing my work. I did manage to print pages successfully but just can't manage to get good spreads when I have to go through creating a pdf first. (I do make use of soft-proofing, use an NEC PA271Q monitor (that I keep well-calibrated) a Canon PRO-100 printer, Red River Ultra Pro Satin 4.0 with the appropriate ICC profile.) The printing I need right now is for an Exhibition taking place in Scotland in April, so this is (for me) a very serious problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Robin

[WiltsLady]

I am having the same problem. I have managed to put printers marks on but it isn't showing the bleed. As a former Illustrator users I was accustomed to specifying the bleed when I created the document but can't see any way of doing that in Affinity.

[fde101]

What are you trying to print - are you just trying to print the facing pages side-by-side on a sheet that is twice the page size, or what are you trying to accomplish?

Also, are you on Mac or Windows?  The Mac uses a standard print dialog that can handle all of the extra Publisher capabilities but Publisher uses its own print dialog on Windows so there could be some slight differences in where things are located in the dialog depending on the platform you are using.

[RobinMcL]

Thank you for the response.

Finally, I have made a little progress but still have many confusions.

Ultimately, I hope to print a book, of about ten signatures, then bind in a standard, sewn signatures, way. I use Windows 7. For now, I am not doing the imposition but simply printing left- and right-hand pages (a spread) on the same sheet of paper and, for now, am using just one side of the paper. (This is because the story is being exhibited alongside the originals of the illustrations and, hence, the  printing is only on one side.) I finally (after many months of effort, forcing me to get pdf software and exporting from Publisher to pdf, then working with the pdf) used the N-up page printing with N = 2 and no space between the pages to accomplish the printing of a spread. I am hoping that this capability, together with using the Booklet printing options may enable me to print signatures. If not, I will still have to export to pdf first and that has resulted in a massive number of color-management problems for me so far.

Even without getting involved with pdfs, I still have many color problems. I have found that the same file, using the same color space in Photo and the same color space in Publisher, and on the same monitor, at the same time, can look very different. This is quite disconcerting. Moving from monitor to print brings its own set of problems. I'm missing something, and something important, but I simply can't discover what it is. One person recommended that I convert all my images to CMYK first. I tried that but got much poorer results. I try very hard to make the best choices of color space, ICC profiles etc. but it is just trial and error. I need a whole lot more explanation. I am quite prepared to spend the time learning but I can't find the information to give me the chance to do this learning. The document has a Colour Format but it also has a Colour Profile and then there is the opportunity to Assign or Convert. I have no idea what I should be doing and don't know how I can find out.

And there may be specific problems when I come to print. I had awful problems with my DataColor calibration and the tech team tried to help me out. I was UTTERLY certain that colour management was switched OFF (set to NONE) in the printer driver of my Canon PRO-100 but, when I sent them the file that had been produced by their software, they could tell that the printer was till doing color management. I contacted Canon about this, on two different occasions and received two different AND OPPOSING suggestions. This does not help. I can get my images the way I want them on my calibrated monitor using Photo. That works fine. It's when I take them from there into Publisher that the problems start.

Using Soft Proof in Publisher one gets, in addition to the selection of the ICC profile and the Intent, a great list of other tweaks. This is tremendous for fine-tuning the image as one is looking at it using the Soft Proof, but one does not have these capabilities when one switches off the Soft Proof in preparation to printing. So what's the point, all the tweaks are lost?

As you can tell, while I can handle the writing of the story, the photography and the editing, and the layout of all that stuff in Publisher, it is the actual publishing that has proven utterly beyond me. If you know of some document or book I can get that will explain what I should do and why, I will gladly get it and study it.

Thanks for your assistance.

Robin

[walt.farrell]

It sounds to me like the "Booklet" option in the Print dialog would do what you need.

[fde101]

Booklet is in effect a single signature - printing the entire book to be stapled and folded as one unit.

The Book option prints separate signatures, but I don't believe there is currently a way to control how many pages are assigned to each signature.

Both options require the number of pages in the document to be a multiple of four (so if you have a 7-page document you will need to add a page at the end before these can be used).