Re: Creating PDF for recto-verso printing (FM 6.O)

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

D.R.

What you are trying to do is what is called "imposition".

The WORST thing you can do (and we can vouch for that from the large
number of complaints we hear from customers who have this done TO THEM
by clueless prepress service providers) is to provide PDF files from
which pages are "placed" into Quark XPress documents. You are guaranteeing
problems that way.

Simplest thing to do is to generate LOGICAL pages in FrameMaker and
create a PDF file with those pages in logical order, i.e. 1 to "n".
Then, in Acrobat using a plugin from Quite Software called "Quite Imposing
Plus", perform the necessary imposition. You have quite a bit of
flexibility with this plugin and many of us at Adobe will vouch for
the high quality of it. You can do n-up documents, booklets, or even
complex books of multiple signatures. It does all the rearranging and
placement of your logical pages into a new document of whatever
physical page size you want. 

A similar plugin product that is also available is called PDF Snake.

        - Dov


At 2/14/2003 01:31 AM, Dorilys Reane wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Yet another problem encountered in our ever-changing documentation...
>
>As per request of the CEO himself, decision has been taken to now make a
>printable book out of our PDF user documentation, which currently reaches
>more than 500 pages (x2, because of French and English versions), and is
>still meant to grow in the near future. Thus, we currently need to produce
>a PDF document that could be used directly for printing by a reprographer
>(the amount of books we're going to release isn't enough to cover the
>costs in a professional printer workshop), as said reprographer doesn't
>use FrameMaker.
>
>My problem is: due to the means this reprographer can use for printing,
>the best solution would be to come up with the following PDF setup: A5
>pages, presented 2 by 2 on an A4 landscape page, meant to be printed in
>recto-verso. Actually, each page in the PDF would have to contain twice
>the same page, i.e.: A4 page 1 contains page 1 x2, A4 page 2 contains page
>2 x2, A4 page 3 contains page 3 x2, and so on (I hope I'm not sounding too
>confusing on this!), as in the following 'schema'(I hope it won't break
>upon posting...):
>
>PDF page 1:
>____________________
>|         |         |
>|         |         |
>|  page 1 | page 1  |
>|         |         |
>|         |         |
>|_________|_________|
>
>PDF page 2:
>____________________
>|         |         |
>|         |         |
>|  page 2 | page 2  |
>|         |         |
>|         |         |
>|_________|_________|
>
>Is there any way to generate such a PDF from FrameMaker (version 6.0 +
>SGML, currently using it under Windows XP Pro), or maybe by slightly
>tweaking in Acrobat 5? I cannot find any way to do this operation, I even
>wonder if it is possible. The only alternative we see for the moment would
>be to generate EPS (a file for each page) and paste them into an Xpress
>book, but this method (though it worked for small, 50 pages books) is way
>too long and unconvenient for such an amount of pages, and the
>reprographer says he can't use a 'regular' PDF file directly for properly
>paginating the document.
>
>I'd be really grateful if someone could point me to a solution, even
>involving third-party tools.
>
>Thanks a lot,
>
>D.R.


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