Imposition

Okay, folks. You’ve made your book. You’ve combed every inch of it, proofed again and again for typos, and designed every­thing to the best of your abil­ity or will­ing­ness. It’s time to impose. Impo­si­tion is the technical/​printerly name we give to reorder­ing all the book pages for print. And here’s the great news: we’re going to skip most of it. (If you’re inter­ested in how it works, here’s the Wiki arti­cle.)

If you’re work­ing in InDe­sign CS, there’s an old plu­gin you can no longer buy* (drop a line and I’ll help you locate a copy) called InBook­let, which gives you all the con­trols you’ll need, and then some. InDe­sign CS2 and up fea­tures a built-​​in plu­gin derived from InBook­let. If you’re work­ing with InDe­sign CS, fol­low the steps below to the best of your abil­ity and com­ment or email if you have any prob­lems. I don’t have it in front of me any­more, so it’s hard to remem­ber all the particulars.

Now, the goods. Save your doc­u­ment. Go to the File menu and choose Print Booklet:

Make sure your set­tings match those above.

Printer
Hope­fully the Printer is set to the cur­rent Adobe PDF engine, which installed with the Cre­ative Suite. If not, we’ll change it below. I’m going to assume you have some knowl­edge of print­ing, or that you can find this info else­where on the net, or via your computer’s Help.

Book­let Type
2-​​up means two pages per sheet of paper. Sad­dle Stitch is the tech­ni­cal name given to stitch­ing (or sta­pling) down the fold in the mid­dle com­mon to chapbooks.

Creep
is awe­some. If your book is long, you’ll notice when fold­ing all those sheets that those in the mid­dle stick out. Because sheets are being pro­gres­sively pushed from the bind­ing edge (spine), your left mar­gin will shift, too. Creep accounts for this by pro­gres­sively shift­ing your mar­gins. Pretty cool, huh?

Mar­gins
Auto­mat­i­cally fit & adjust ‘em.

Print Blank Printer Spreads
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, KEEP THIS CHECKED. Some pages in your book are blank. That’s fine. If this goes unchecked, how­ever, the file we’re cre­at­ing will just snip those out, which will throw off all the hard work InDesign’s doing to reorder your pages. You want your blanks to show up where you intended them. Take it from me: it’s the small­est mis­take with the most hair-​​tearing result you can make in this process.

Now choose Print Set­tings… at the bot­tom. Click Setup. Assum­ing you’re work­ing with a letter-​​half sheet, make sure your set­ting match mine. Click OK. If your Printer is set to some­thing other than Adobe PDF, you can change that here, too:

Back in the Print Book­let dia­log, click Pre­view and make sure the pages aren’t larger than the print area. It’ll look weird; your first and last page on the first pre­view spread, but relax, that’s how it’s sup­posed to look:

If everything’s groovy, click Print. It will crunch a bunch of num­bers, give you a progress bar, and pro­duce a Post­script file in the back­ground. Dis­tiller should then fire up, churn the Post­script file into a PDF, and place it on your desk­top. Nifty. If for some rea­son this doesn’t hap­pen, locate the Post­script file on your machine (prob­a­bly on the desk­top, or at least bear­ing the same name as your InDe­sign file, with a .ps exten­sion. Drag it onto the Dis­tiller, located with your other Cre­ative Suite applications.

From here, I rec­om­mend you bring your file (email, jump drive, etc) to a print shop in town. They have machines intended to print double-​​sided, and unless you have such a printer at home (they’re not that expen­sive now), save your­self the headache. As in all things DIY, Fuck Kinko’s.

*Its devel­oper went outta busi­ness and was bought, iron­i­cally, by Quark, Adobe’s competition.