making printer spreads in Quark 6

[howdoyou]

I am printing manuals from Quark 6 and I have them layed out as reader spreads (page 1-2,3-4,5-6 etc.). When they have to go to print, they have to be layed out as printer spreads (page 1-36, 2-32 etc.) Does anyone know an easy way of doing this. The manuals are about 36 pages and there must be an easy way to lay the pages out correctly for the printer. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Seb

 

[signal49]

Well, I work at a print shop and I do this once in a while... Unfortunately, I don't think Quark has an easy way of doing this. There are plugins like Quite Imposing, but they cost money.

Do you have your page size set as finished (folded) size or as run (spread) size? If it's set for finished size, what I usually do is, in the Page Layout (F10) window I move each page in order 1-x from top to bottom in one row. Then I go to the very last page and drag it to the left of the first page. (So it would be 36,1 next to each other, for example.) Then I drag the last page to the right of your page 2 (now 3 in the Page Layout window) so it would be 2,35 together. You should really make a dummy book and number the pages the way you have them, so when you take it apart you will see what pages should be together. Basically the pattern is (for a 12-page booklet): 12,1 / 2,11 / 10,3 / 4,9 / 8,5 / 6,7

So, yeah, kind of a pain in the butt. But it gets easier once you see the pattern. And if you do this a lot, it's worth it to buy a plugin!

 

[Pixelchik]

My experience has been that the printers prefer to do the imposition themselves. I've never had to do it for any printer I've used. Maybe you could ask them if they can handle that task?

 

[signal49]

Pixelchik has a point... You don't always know what size sheet they're going to run or how many pages per side they want.

At my shop, we print (usually) 2 pages per side as I described before. I personally prefer the files set up as printer's spreads when I get it, because we don't have any imposition software and I have to do it by hand. There's always a chance that something on the page can move when rearranging pages in the native program (Quark in this case). So, if you can get your printer to do it for you, make sure you see a proof and check it CAREFULLY! ;-)