The Imposition Blog

Do you ever need to print on Avery pre-perforated blank sheets of labels or business cards?

InDesign + IDImposer makes it quick and easy to get perfect results every time.

1. First, design one label or business card in InDesign.
2. If you need bleed (which Avery calls “Print to Edge”), specify the bleed in InDesign’s Document Setup dialog.
3. Then, click the “Apply Preset” button, choose one of the Avery presets, and click the “Impose” button.

Hints:

• The IDImposer Avery preset library can be installed anywhere on your machine, or on a fileserver.
• To ensure accurate alignment, be sure to choose or create a “no margins” version of your paper size. Otherwise the sometimes-asymmetrical “Printable Area” of the paper choice can cause misalignment.
• Do a test print on normal printer paper before you print on the Avery blank sheet. Make sure the alignment is what you are expecting.
• If you need a layout that is not in these libraries yet, just make your own. You will probably have to get out your ruler and do your own measurements of the sheet margins, single-label size, and spacing; or, you can download the Illustrator or InDesign ‘template’ from an Avery web site and read off the numbers from the information bar.
• The U.S. Avery library is all on Letter sized sheets in portrait orientation; the metric (‘MM’) library is all on A4 sized sheets, also in portrait orientation. But IDImposer knows how to turn a portrait-sheet preset into a landscape-sheet preset, so you have all of the landscape-sheet orientations as well. This makes it very easy to lay out 4- or 5-column, 2-row sheets of vertical business cards, for example.

Suppose you are producing a 24-page Saddle Stitch Booklet, in 6 Sheets. (Each Sheet contains 4 Pages — 2 on the front side, and 2 on the back side.)

1. Stack 6 blank sheets of the paper stock that you will be using.
2. Measure the thickness of the stack.
3. In IDImposer, typically you will want to specify the Outer Creep as the stack thickness, with an Inner Creep of 0.
   (Alternatively, you can have the Outer Creep be half of the stack thickness, and the Inner Creep also be half of the thickness, but negative.)
4. Click the ‘Impose’ button.
5. Now look at the output doc. Note that the text and other contents of the ‘outer’ sheet (Page 24 / Page 1) have been shifted away from the fold, by approximately the amount of the specified Outer Creep. But the contents of the ‘inner’ sheet (Page 14 / Page 11) will not be shifted at all.
6. Print, fold, staple.

Note that, with thick saddle stitched booklets, you must take care not to have contents very close to the outer edges of the outer sheets, or some of the contents may be clipped or nearly-clipped.

If you like formulas:

shiftAmountForThisSheet = outerCreep – (sheetIndex * (outerCreep – innerCreep) / (numberOfSheets – 1))

where sheetIndex is zero-based.

You like IDImposer, but sometimes you are given a PDF file instead of an InDesign Document to impose?

No problem. In your IDImposer > RESOURCES > HelperScripts folder is a fast and reliable script that can Place the pages of  your PDF file into a new InDesign Document, automatically making your Document have the correct page size, and even handling Bleeds if present.  Just click and go.