Do you ever need to print on Avery or other pre-perforated blank sheets of labels or business cards? InDesign + IDImposer makes it quick and easy to get perfect results every time.
Here’s the procedure:
- First, design one label or business card in InDesign.
- If you need bleed (which Avery calls “Print to Edge”), specify a nonzero bleed in InDesign’s Document Setup dialog.
- Select the “Apply .geo” command in the “Miscellaneous Commands” dropdown, and choose one of the Avery presets.
- Click the “Impose” button.
- Check the results.
- Print as many copies as you need.
Hints:
- The IDImposer Avery preset library is in the RESOURCES folder of the IDImposer 11 download. The presets have the extension “.geo”.
- To ensure accurate alignment when printing the imposed result, 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-label sheets. 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.
