Quark Pagination to book format 4

[dusty123]

Grr.. Sorry to ask but I am stuck.

I just finished writing a book in Quark. I have facing pages (8.5"x5.5") so that I can print 2-up on letter sized - landscape.

This is all good. now I am ready to double-side print the final copy and find that I am screwed. aggrh!

I need to repaginate this thing so that I don't have to print, cut and paste the (8.5x5.5) sheets onto paper and xerox them. All I want to do is print my book so I can read it like a book.

Does anyone have any suggestions on software repagination for book formatting? Any sound advice would be most highly appreciated. In fact - I would even consider a free copy of this book to anyone who can help me solve this (it's really is a cool book. I know that everyone says that - but this one is all about getting LOTS of dates - so I really need to get this printed)

Thanks all the same

Dusty

 

[RyanPace]

Dusty, unfortunately Quark does not have a pagination feature. Many printers have third party sofware to handle this task. If you are taking it to be printed I would find a printer that has this capability. However if you are printing this yourself on a copier or printer you will need to create your own printer spreads. You will have to use your document layout palette to manually move the pages.

If you have a 100 page book it should start 100/1, 2/99, 98/3, 4/97 and so on. I am sorry this is probably not what you wanted to hear.

 

[MarcusStringer]

Correct me if I'm wrong...
I would guess you could get you hands on an imposition plugin for Quark, which should let you do what you want...

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[dusty123]

Hey thanks!

Well I did get some responses back from professional printers today, but I have not checked what they say yet (prolly something to the effect of "Give us money and we will solve your problem"). I wanted to see what the replies were here first.

Again i thank both of you for your help. I have saved every page as an EPS, then in photoshop as a gif so that I can rip the 2-up format apart and rearrange it to its proper order. I am looking on google next for the "imposition plugin for Quark" to see if anything comes up.

In the interim, as Ryan suggested, I have attempted to manually do an electronic paste-up job. The pages "looked like" they should print in the proper order (1-162, 2-161... and so on. But the first attempt came out so that my pages read right to left (82, 81, 79...)

(Oops!)

The next attempt was much better (after a few more hours of cutting and pasting), but finally when I printed it out, the printer fed sheets backwards, and no matter how I tried to fix it the whole thing was screwy. I felt positively retarded.

So if all else fails, I will just start a new quark document and paste all of the gifs in it (it will be HUGE!) but it should print one side and then I can feed the paper and do the other side. I am feeling a bit like Prometheus here. grr...

K thanks again

Ciao

 

[RyanPace]

Dusty I would be cautious about converting all your pages to eps or gif and placing. For one, you dont want to rasterize your type. When you convert from eps to gif you are no longer working with vector type. It is now pixels and will print "fuzzy". I would try and find a way to fix your issue in Quark. It sounds like you have an 8.5x11 document instead of two 8.5x5.5 pages set up as spreads. If this is the case try drawing two 8.5x5.5 boxes on your master page. In a worse case scenario you could at least group each page and move them manually. This will be a pain but if you have set your doc up as 8.5x11 imposition sofware won't even work because it will only see the whole page not each half.

Again your cover should start on the right side of the first page, back cover on the left and so on. It definitely pays to think out a big project like this before you do all the work, as you have probably realized it can bite you in the end.

 

[dusty123]

Ryan

Thanks again - and you are 100% correct. In fact, last night around 3 am I finally realized everything I did wrong and what to do about it. Here's the short version (in case anyone ever has this problem again):

First: my mistake was writing my original copy in quark. I should have written it in Star Office (free MS Word equivalent). Quark is only for layout. The text overflow screwed me.

My next mistake was doing my layout as I added new text (kids - do not try this at home!) Write your text, doodle images and move on. Save laout until last! 4 (completed) books under my belt and I am just now learning this - sheesh!

Okay here's the fix: (sorry for the length)

I created a new document. Both the full quark document that was giving me trouble and the new (empty document) were 8.5 x5.5 pages and tiled vertically. I turned OFF text overflow on the new document and copied/pasted each individual page of text.

As to the illustrations, I clicked the move tool and "selected all" on thatpage, dragged everything over to the exact same page in the new document and then as a last step deleted the text box that I had dragged from the old document.

This whole process may sound cumbersome, but I did 100 pages in less than 30 minutes. I will get to the rest tonight. What that did for me was to perfectly align the images, lines (anything that wasn't text) because it was already aligned in the original document.

So all I had to do was delete the troublesome (now "extra") text box. Obviously on pages that only had text all I needed to do was copy/paste the text that appeared on that page.

So I am back in happy "ready-to-print land" once again - just as soon as I repaginate this bastard. I hope no one ever has this problem, but if they do, the solution is in this thread.

My sincere thanks again

Dusty

 

[Evegenia]

I wish I've seen your question earlier.
I work for a prinshop and we see this kind of problem all the time. What we usually do is PDF the file, then us the QuiteImposing plug-in which paginates books. The whole process takes about 2 minutes.
Anyway I hope your book is a huge success.

 

[dawnwise]

I also wish I'd seen this earlier. Quite Imposing has been a Godsend!
We used to get files submitted as facing pages in reader's spreads, repaginating them in to printer's pairs without Quite Imposing was along and tedious process.

 

[MarcusStringer]

That's what I said before... I didn't think I was wrong...

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[dusty123]

Thank you thank you thank you (all three of you

The book is doing quite well (now that I can print it - and of course copies are soon off to Fidler-Doubleday, so this won't be a problem in the future.

But as I am already working on yet a new book, this is "really good info to know!"

Best of luck everyone (with everything) and of course: Thanks again. I couldn't have gotten past this hump w/o you :-D