Printing Signatures

[RobinMcL]

Hello,

I have a small book ready to print but have not yet managed to find a way to do so. I have many, many problems but the one of greatest significance is to find a way of actually printing the book in the signatures I need for binding. The following is what I have looked at. There must be a solution somewhere (It is called Publisher after all.) but I have not found it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

1. I require signatures from 1 (rare) to 4 sheets of paper (that is, 4 to 16 pages). However, this requirement is not fixed as, for different books, I will be using paper of differing thicknesses and hence will select different numbers of sheets for the signatures.
2. I have coloured photos that go to the edge of the spread and cover the entire spread, NOT just an entire page. This means that I have to use Bleed and then trim the text block.
3. If I use Booklet as the printing option, it prints the entire file as a single signature (a "booklet" is, essentially, a single signature.) This is no good whatsoever. An average book has between 6 and 10 sheets for each signature. I've never seen a 100 page book bound in a single signature. Since I am using thick paper, my signatures will have about three sheets (on average).
4. If I use Book as the printing option, then it does the page imposition assuming that each signature has a single sheet. This option is equally useless as it would force me into hand sewing every single sheet. As above, I have never seen a book where all the signatures have only a single sheet.
5. Since neither of these options make sense in my situation, I have tried workarounds via the use of pdf files. I purchased a PDF editor (at twice the price of Publisher) just to do the imposition - but that failed too! The reason is subtle ( and very frustrating). IF I export spreads then I can get the bleed done correctly AND get crop marks etc., things that I need for alignment and trimming at the binding stage. BUT, while the PDF software CAN do imposition, it is NOT imposition of spreads that I need. It is imposition of pages AND .... Phew! IF I export, from Publisher, as Pages, THEN it puts bleed round each page. That is, Bleed round FOUR sides of each page (not round each spread)!!! So then, when the imposition is done, there are two strips of bleed down the middle of each spread! Ouch!! This is NOT what is required. If I export as pages WITHOUT bleed, then the imposition in the PDF software does look fine. BUT there is no bleed, crop marks etc. So, although this looks nice on the monitor, it is NOT suitable for printing and binding when I need to trim the text block on the Crop Marks.

There are additional, still serious, problems.

1. I use Affinity Photo for photo-editing but, when I put a Photo image into Publisher, the colours change. I have checked and I have the same colour profile in each. I have also checked using Windows Explorer preview window. There is NO difference between the image in Photo and Windows Explorer (preview), but the same image in Publisher is significantly different.
2. When I try my workaround by creating a PDF file, I have not yet found a way to get a PDF that does not change the colours.

My monitor is a high-end NEC with its own 14-bit LUT and I re-calibrate it every two weeks.

Surely all I need MUST be in Publisher but I have not found it yet. I have searched the tutorials but found no reference. I have been struggling with this for two years (from PagePlus9 days). The imposition algorithm is utterly trivial. I expected to find it under Print but can't see it. Where is it?

I will be eternally grateful to anyone who can help me solve this problem. I have spent two years on this project, spent many thousands of dollars all the time assuming that printing a small book would be a feature in any publishing software. I have asked this question before and people have been sympathetic but could offer me no solution. I hope someone out there knows the answer. Splitting my file into several files is not practical as small changes are likely to be made from one printing to the next and these would cascade over all subsequent files. There is also the problem of all the photos covering entire spreads, not just pages.

Sincerely,

Robin

[MikeW]

No possibility of signatures. Consider buying an imposition application that will have better control over the imposition process.

Mike 

[Seneca]

40 minutes ago, RobinMcL said:

I will be eternally grateful to anyone who can help me solve this problem.

Sorry if I didn't grasp your requirements but are you going to print this book yourself on your local printer or are you going to send it out to a professional printer?

[Seadog]

17 hours ago, RobinMcL said:

There are additional, still serious, problems.

1. I use Affinity Photo for photo-editing but, when I put a Photo image into Publisher, the colours change. I have checked and I have the same colour profile in each. I have also checked using Windows Explorer preview window. There is NO difference between the image in Photo and Windows Explorer (preview), but the same image in Publisher is significantly different.
2. When I try my workaround by creating a PDF file, I have not yet found a way to get a PDF that does not change the colours.

Hope I can give you a little encouragement regarding "changed" colours and AffPublisher. Forgive me if this is something you already know about.

I have just this week had printed (by professional printer) a booklet, almost entirely laid out in and output from Aff Publisher. As previous editions of the book were laid out in Apple Pages (not a bad app by the way, but a bit limited), I decided some of the more complex pages should continue in this issue to be generated from within Pages as I didn't want to start from scratch designing them in AffPublsher.

The finished pages  in the Pages app were output as the usual high-res PDFs required for this job by the printer. The nub of this story is that I got quite a shock to discover at this stage that the output PDFs from Pages app displayed marked differences in colour to colours displayed on similar pages being worked on in Aff Publisher.......eeeek!  This was despite identical colours  being used on both sets of pages (ie within Pages app and within AffPub). All of the above relates to the colours displayed ON SCREEN – the same screen for all.

Foolhardy or not, I pressed on, dropping the odd-looking PDFs generated in Pages into blind holding pages in the book file in AffPub. Then the whole was output to PDFs and off to the printer.  It was a huge relief to discover, when I arrived to pass page proofs at the printer's, that the colours had been output and more importantly printed identically to each other on both sets of pages, regardless of the disparity in the ON SCREEN originals.

Moral of this tale:  not all programs display graphics – especially PDFs – in the same way on screen. (Which I sort of vaguely knew but had never tested in a production run)

Hope this helps you RobinMcL.......

[Amontillado]

I'm working through a similar situation.

The solution I'm using is save the file I want to print. Create a new file and use Document->Add pages from file to grab a range of pages for the signature I want to print next. Make sure to grab an even multiple of four pages.

Use the section manager to set the starting page correctly, otherwise page numbers will restart at 1.

Ignore preflight warnings to fix tables of contents (hopefully that was done before saving the main file).

Print the signature. Repeat for each signature. Imposition is correct. If you use or reference page numbers, it's critical to use the section manager to set the starting page number of each signature as you print it.