The top of the main dialog contains the name of the currently open InDesign source document and the document’s page count. This is followed by the version of IDImposer, and by the Register, About, Cancel, and Impose buttons.
The Panel dropdown will say “Layout” when IDImposer is first opened. The dialog controls in the Layout panel define how the reader order pages are to be arranged on the output sheets.
The ‘Output Sheets’ dropdown gives you the opportunity to quickly test your Layout settings by creating only the first few sheets if you wish. This might be useful for large publications, such as a chapter of a book.
IDImposer Main (Layout) panel
Imposition Type
Imposition Type defines the ordering of pages on sheets.
‘Saddle’, or ‘nested’, is the layout typically used by booklets, newsletters, and the like. In this arrangement, we fold the sheets in half, and then insert them into each other. To bind, we typically staple at the ‘spine’ fold.
For example, the Saddle page order for a 12-page, 3 sheet booklet is (12,1) front and (2,11) back, then (10,3) front and (4,9) back, then (8,5) front and (6,7) back.
The ‘Perfect Bound’ Imposition Type is used for books and other thick publications. The folded pages are gathered, rather than inserted as in Saddle Stitch, before binding. So the Perfect Bound page order is (4,1) front and (2,3) back, then (8,5) front and (6,7) back, and so on.
But what if the desired binding requires something in-between nested Saddle and ‘simple’ Perfect Bound assembly? IDImposer calls that a special case of Perfect Bound, with SheetsPerSignature > 1 (see the Options panel). For example, if SheetsPerSignature is 3, and the document contains 24 pages, the first 3 sheets are nested together, and the second 3 sheets are nested together, giving us a page sequence of:
Sheet 1: Front (12,1) Back (2,11) Sheet 2: Front (10,3) Back (4,9) Sheet 3: Front (8,5) Back (6,7) Sheet 4: Front (24,13) Back (14,23) Sheet 5: Front (22,15) Back (16,21) Sheet 6: Front (20,17) Back (18,19)
Consecutive Imposition Type is used for N by M arrangements of consecutively ordered thumbnails, or for printing unfolded documents such as spiral-bound, or stapled-at-an-edge documents.
Cut Stack is also used for N by M arrangements of pages, but the pages are sequential from the top of the output stack of sheets downward through each of the N by M stacks. Both 2-sided and 1-sided printing is supported for cut stack.
Step and Repeat can be used for printing sheets of business cards or labels, and for replicating a simple 2-up imposition to better utilize available space on the sheet. Yes, you can do impositions of impositions. That’s how I created these output samples.
Page Sequence files
The final 30 or so entries in the Imposition Type list are the names of the “Page Sequence” XML files that are contained in the IDImposer RESOURCES > PageSequence folder. Each of these XML files specifies an imposition layout.
These files are simple text files, and can be opened — and edited — by any simple text editor. (Microsoft Word is not a ‘simple text editor’). The PageSequence_ReadMe.txt file, contained in the IDImposer’s RESOURCES > Docs folder, describes the format.
Currently, many of the PageSequence files are oriented toward book publishing, with typically smaller page sizes and larger press sheets. For these jobs, the number of pages per side of a sheet could be 12 or 16 or more.
