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Re: 2-up

>I am currently trying to decide the best way to set some booklets as
2-up on
>8.5 x11 paper. The docutec folks are urging me (and I see their point)
to
>set it up for them in the PDF or Postscript printer resource files.  
> 
>What have other folks done to accomplish this in the best way?
> 
>Win NT 4.0, FrameMaker 5.5.6, PS Driver 5.1.2

1. Use a post-print-to-file processor. PostScript based imposition is
EXPENSIVE and suited only for the pre-press crowd. An old utility called
ClickBooks is still hanging on (I did a search on it last year and found
it being sold to parish business offices on some site that specialized
in church-office software) that was demo-ware in 1997. Acrobat plug-ins
are probably your best bet in this universe, given Frame's friendliness
with Acrobat. 

2. There's been a solution posted before that boils down to authoring in
one file and importing the whole flow into various length pre-designed
"imposed" Frame templates (16-page, 20-page, ...200-page, 204-page...). 

Having once set up such a Frame workaround, I have to say it's a painful
kludge that can work if your math is good and your patience better. But
I plan to spend money on the Acrobat plug-in and let the computer do the
hard work. 

The basic idea for this is to set up a doc with twice as big a page as
your actual pages are, then assemble each page with hand-connected
frames across the document. Practically speaking, this is only useful up
to about 20 or 32 pages. 

Page "1"	= Frame A: page #1, Frame B: page #16
Page "2"	= Frame A: page #15, Frame B: page #2
...

And you cannot use Frame's built-in page numbering because it numbers
its pages and not the real pages. 

Good luck! I'm sure you'll hear about other solutions from the people
who've remembered what I've forgotten.

Deborah Snavely
Document Architect, Technical Publications, 
Aurigin Systems, Inc. http://www.aurigin.com/ 

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