Print page range as booklet does not work

[garrettm30]

When trying to print only certain pages in a booklet, pages that should not be included are included. Here are some steps to illustrate

1. Open the attached sample file.
2. File -> Print
3. Under the Range and Scale section, enter 5-8 in the Pages field.
4. Under the Document Layout section, choose Booklet as the Model.

The print preview may be sufficient to see the results. I expected a single sheet booklet containing pages five through eight, the ones that say "Print" on them. Instead, pages one through four are also included.

I am reporting from Mac 10.14.5, Publisher 1.7.1 (also tried 1.7.2.422). Printing to Canon irADV 8585i, page size US Letter.

booklet_range_test.afpub

[thomaso]

It works for me with 5-8 only if I choose "Book" instead of "Booklet".
(which now let me understand what makes the difference: a book bound with thread stitching is made of several booklets so to say)

[garrettm30]

That's an interesting observation, and thanks for testing. Unfortunately, I think it was just because my document was short with only two multiples of four. I could not use the same trick for the real work I am doing where I discovered the problem. Back to my illustrate it with my test file from the original post, when I try this:

1. Duplicate one of the first four pages (I chose the first)

2. Then try to print pages 6-9

I get this result when I try to print as a book rather than a booklet:

 

It is including pages that were not in my range of pages 6-9. Also, as I sent four pages for the booklet, that should result in two printed pages (one sheet on both sides). However, notice at the bottom of the preview that it says "1 of 3."

[thomaso]

30 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

2. Then try to print pages 6-9

I guess you should start with an odd – not even (6) – page number to make it work.
Whereas: also it might depend whether your document starts on a left or right page. (I haven't tried)

[garrettm30]

This is sufficient to illustrate the bug in any case. Now I have to decide how to work around it. I am afraid I am going to have to just split my document up into pieces as separate documents.

[thomaso]

10 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

This is sufficient to illustrate the bug in any case.

What does illustrate the bug? That you want to start with the left page 6 but the right page 5 is used instead? It's rather artificial intelligence than a bug.

Check your other printer driver option settings which do influence double-paged printing, for instance reverse order and page flip or whatever your printer (your custom defined "Press") offers as settings which might affect page order.

 

58 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

I think it was just because my document was short with only two multiples of four.

I don't think so, because I had used your 8 page document for my test.

[garrettm30]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

What does illustrate the bug?

The bug is this: the page range I entered is not the page range that is printed. You confirmed as much yourself in booklet mode. It so happens that the conditions I set in the sample file do work if you change the mode from booklet to book, but this often does not work if the page count of the original or the requested page range is different.

For example, if you start from the same file I originally posted, and altar my steps to include pages 4-7 instead of 5-8, and use your suggestion of book rather than booklet (here are the altered steps for convenience):

1. Open the attached sample file.
2. File -> Print
3. Under the Range and Scale section, enter 4-7 in the Pages field.
4. Under the Document Layout section, choose Book as the Model.

I should have a booklet that when folded goes 4, 5, 6, 7. Instead, what prints with those steps goes in this order: 1, 8, 7, blank, blank, 6, 5, 4.

It should be apparent that something is not working as intended.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

It should be apparent that something is not working as intended.

To me it is the intention which is not working.
Again in your recent sample, you expect a brochure starting with an even page (number 4), which would be a LEFT page. How would it look like and continue? Could you please make a manual or digital sketch (with just numbers) of your expected page order and starting with the closed brochure, showing 1 title page (page number 4) only?

For now to me it is apparent that the software understands quite well that it does not understand your intention (starting a booklet with a LEFT page) (like I don't understand either).

[garrettm30]

As this is a bug report, I am confident that Serif will let me know if they need further clarification.

[fde101]

Limiting the range of pages is handled by the OS, while the imposition is being done by the application.

As a result, the page range limitation is likely being applied after the (book in this case) is being imposed - it is organizing ALL of the pages of the book, then only printing a limited set of the imposed pages.

However, there is also some rather obvious confusion in how the two features are interacting.

With the "book" mode for example, if printing all of 8 pages, you would get two sheets of output: the first would have pages 1-4 organized as 4/1 on one side and 2/3 on the other, while the second would have pages 5-8 organized as 8/5 on one side and 6/7 on the other.

The preview does indeed show the 5/8 combination, suggesting that the imposition happened on the entire document rather than on the range of pages, then only a subset of the resulting, already-imposed pages was selected for printing.

Note that after imposition there are only four pages (two sheets times two sides), so asking for a range of 4-7 should in effect give only the fourth "page" but for some reason you seem to be getting four pages anyway.  The OS and the imposition feature of the application seem to be in disagreement here, so I do think there is a bug here somewhere, but I don't think it is the one you seem to be reporting (explained below).

 

On 7/15/2019 at 1:01 PM, garrettm30 said:

what prints with those steps goes in this order: 1, 8, 7, blank, blank, 6, 5, 4.

Working on the assumption that imposition is happening first, the pages available to the OS should be 4/1, 2/3, 8/5 and 6/7.  You are getting four pages (two sheets) with one being blank, and it sounds like 2/3 were replaced with a blank page and the pages got jumbled within the printing mechanism: it looks like instead of 4/1 with 2/3 and 8/5 paired with 6/7, you somehow ended up with 4/1 paired with 8/5 and 6/7 paired with blank/blank, and that you are trying to assemble the pages like a booklet instead of the book that was selected.  In this case, you would have 4/1 forming the front and back, open that and on the inside of that is the 8/5 page, but with the 6/7 page inserted inside of it (7 being the "front" of the inside page) you get the ordering that you indicated.

 

I think you are expecting the imposition to happen to the range of pages you are providing, but the printing system doesn't work that way.  Instead, Publisher is imposing the entire document as a book, then the OS is only printing part of what is already imposed.  In this situation, after imposition, the OS should have only seen four pages available to print, but it is still trying to grab four pages from the application, resulting in the range being applied in a somewhat unexpected manner.  The pages are paired correctly for each side of the page, but it almost looks like it is taking the range of 4-7 and getting page four (6/7), then adding a blank page to the end to account for the fact that there is no page 5 (giving the 6/7 paired with blank/blank), then for whatever reason wrapping around to the beginning of the document and giving 4/1, but skipping 2/3 and giving 8/5 on the back of 4/1?  Not sure how that "logic" is working, but I think the fact that you can select pages after page 4 for printing after the book is imposed is the actual bug here.

[garrettm30]

Thanks for having a look. Something is clearly not working right, but as we are hovering around the problem, maybe we are giving Serif the clues it needs.

7 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Limiting the range of pages is handled by the OS

That would make sense, but I am not entirely sure that is true in Affinity's implementation. The dropdown of subsections appears to me to be divided into application - OS - printer, and the Range and Scale is grouped in the application section. When you compare where the page range appears in Affinity to other apps, it is clearly different. Here are Affinity, Apple Pages, and Safari

 

I could be wrong on assuming that the Range and Scale section is provided at the application level, and even if I am not, Affinity could still be hooking into OS functions even if the subsection was created by Serif. Serif obviously knows how it works, so they can sort it out.

23 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Working on the assumption that imposition is happening first, the pages available to the OS should be 4/1, 2/3, 8/5 and 6/7.  You are getting four pages (two sheets) with one being blank, and it sounds like 2/3 were replaced with a blank page and the pages got jumbled within the printing mechanism: it looks like instead of 4/1 with 2/3 and 8/5 paired with 6/7, you somehow ended up with 4/1 paired with 8/5 and 6/7 paired with blank/blank, and that you are trying to assemble the pages like a booklet instead of the book that was selected.  In this case, you would have 4/1 forming the front and back, open that and on the inside of that is the 8/5 page, but with the 6/7 page inserted inside of it (7 being the "front" of the inside page) you get the ordering that you indicated.

You and I are reporting the order of pages differently. I was reporting how it appears once folded into a booklet. The opening cover had page 8 on it, the inside front cover had page 1, etc. To rephrase closer to what you said, here is the same order as the printer saw it:

Front 1: 4/1
Back 1: 8/5
Front 2: 6/7

Only three pages are sent, so the blank pages is just the unprinted side of the second sheet of paper.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe some explanation on why I am doing this is needed. There are two different scenarios where I would print booklets of only part of a document, and I do both of these rather often in InDesign, except ID has a dedicated "Print Booklet" feature. For other things, I have so far been able to achieve my booklet needs with the Publisher way, but not in these two scenarios:

Scenario 1 is where we are preparing a book, and we want to print chapters individually for the editing process. We could print as singles, but printing the page range as booklets gives us a better preview of the layout, and it keeps them more concise.

Scenario 2 is where we have a series of short booklets that in their finished form are printed separately, but they are kept in a single file so they can benefit from one set of master pages and one set of styles. This second scenario is where I was working when I discovered the problem. I have a series of 15 lessons, all formatted the same, each to be printed on either one or two sheets of paper (that is, either 4 or 8 pages when folded and stitched). I find it preferable to keep all 15 in a single file and print only sections. For this project in Publisher, I did need to split it into 15 separate documents to get it to print correctly. And as happens so often, I did have to make a change to one of the paragraph styles, so that was 15 changes instead of one.

One feature that would be nice to have, which would to help get around this issue, would be if one could select several pages in the Pages studio, right click, and send those directly to print. Then I think the print dialog would only have access to those pages.

 

[fde101]

10 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

I could be wrong on assuming that the Range and Scale section is provided at the application level,

Good catch...  and no, I think you are correct.

I still suspect Publisher is doing the imposition before the page limits are applied.  Maybe this needs to change - perhaps the range in the "Range and Scale" section should be done before imposition, and the range in the "Layout" area after?

In any case, I do think there is a bug in the current behavior of how the page range is being selected when imposition is being done.

 

11 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Front 1: 4/1
Back 1: 8/5
 Front 2: 6/7

Thanks, that matches what I thought you were getting.

 

14 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

One feature that would be nice to have, which would to help get around this issue, would be if one could select several pages in the Pages studio, right click, and send those directly to print. Then I think the print dialog would only have access to those pages.

This might be better handled through the "print persona" that has previously been requested/discussed on the forums?

[garrettm30]

17 minutes ago, fde101 said:

This might be better handled through the "print persona" that has previously been requested/discussed on the forums?

A dedicated print or imposition persona would be a great addition in my opinion, and it would really make Publisher stand out in a similar way that the Export persona does in the other apps. I assume it will not come any time soon even if they do decide to add it. Maybe it could be a good candidate for version 2.

[Devin.]

On 7/17/2019 at 7:31 AM, garrettm30 said:

Scenario 2 is where we have a series of short booklets that in their finished form are printed separately, but they are kept in a single file so they can benefit from one set of master pages and one set of styles.

While I have no new insights to add to the conversation, I also need Scenario 2 for my work. So, adding another voice to the bug report.

[Jon P]

I've logged Scenario 2 (and what is demonstrated in the OP), apologies for the slow reply.

[floranis]

Scenario 3 is when I want to bind a book myself.

On 7/13/2019 at 6:31 PM, thomaso said:

a book bound with thread stitching is made of several booklets so to say

like this:

where I have the first "booklet" being pages 1-16 (a 4-sheet-booklet), second 17-32 etc

This does not work with the option "Book" as this prints 4 consecutive pages on one sheet 4-1-2-3 then 5-8-6-7 then 9-12-10-11 (so to say a series of 1-sheet-booklets)

garettm30 - have you found another solution for this?

On 7/15/2019 at 5:12 PM, garrettm30 said:

This is sufficient to illustrate the bug in any case. Now I have to decide how to work around it. I am afraid I am going to have to just split my document up into pieces as separate documents.

I also came up with the splitting workaround. Which also means that I have to erase the page numbers on the master page, type each number on each page manually and then split the document into 16-page sections and print each document (each booklet) separately :-///

On 8/15/2019 at 4:40 PM, Jon P said:

I've logged Scenario 2 (and what is demonstrated in the OP), apologies for the slow reply.

Sorry to have to ask, I am new here - Does this mean that Serif heard us and that they will do something about it?

 

[garrettm30]

1 hour ago, floranis said:

have you found another solution for this?

I'm afraid I have not. For me this is not a particularly frequent issue, fortunately. It was unfortunate that the document I originally wrote about needed to be 15 separate documents rather than one single document, as I did have some text style changes that I needed to make, and that meant making it in 15 documents instead of one.

 

1 hour ago, floranis said:

Sorry to have to ask, I am new here - Does this mean that Serif heard us and that they will do something about it?

Yes. It means that have logged it as a bug for their developers to investigate, with the intention that they will eventually fix it. I say "eventually" because they have hundreds or even thousands of issues to go through. I can't really know how many they have, but "hundreds" at least does not seem unfounded, based on what we do see in the forums. How soon a bug gets fixed is quite variable, depending both on the priority and on the complexity involved in fixing it. Some bugs get fixed by the very next beta, while others are still open after a few years.

[floranis]

4 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

I did have some text style changes that I needed to make, and that meant making it in 15 documents instead of one.

omg, that is a lot of work!

unfortunately for me this is a frequent issue as it is this is THE thing I want to do with Publisher :-(
 

14 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

while others are still open after a few years

oh my

Do you know if there is a way to start the page numbers with "higher" automated numbers? (like my/your second document respectively "booklet" starts e.g. with page number 17) I know that it is possible the other way (page number 1 appearing on page 5). It would make this workaround much easier.

Thanks!

[garrettm30]

4 minutes ago, floranis said:

Do you know if there is a way to start the page numbers with "higher" automated numbers? (like my/your second document respectively "booklet" starts e.g. with page number 17) I know that it is possible the other way (page number 1 appearing on page 5). It would make this workaround much easier.

Yes. You do it with the Section Manager. See this screenshot, and I have attached a simple file set up so that the first page begins with 5.

page_number_sample.afpub

Note: the pages studio still labels them as "Page 1," "Page 2," etc., even though the page number as a field respects your numbering. For example, in my screenshot above, Pages 1-5 (as they would appear in the pages studio) are numbered 5-9.

 

[floranis]

6 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Yes. You do it with the Section Manager.

 

Thank you so much!!!!

Life isn't that terrible anymore as it was this morning! :--)

[garrettm30]

3 minutes ago, floranis said:

Life isn't that terrible anymore as it was this morning!

No problem, especially if I can make life not terrible just by writing a couple of posts.

[thomaso]

On 8/15/2019 at 4:40 PM, Jon P said:

I've logged Scenario 2 (and what is demonstrated in the OP), apologies for the slow reply.

Since for the current beta v.1.9.0.742 are no bug fixes listed (but new features) I wonder if this bug, initially reported for v.1.7.1, is meant to be solved. – Any news about this?

This recent post, added to an existing (2018) topic in "Feature Requests", reminded me to this print book/booklet issue:

"In some way the other post you mentioned is related. The inconvenient is that if I choose Book there are no way to divided it in several signatures to sew. And the display of images don't fit the order to make that. I will search another way. "