Booklet imposition
What Booklet imposition actually does
A saddle-stitched booklet is a stack of sheets folded once and stapled through the spine, and the awkward part is that the reading order and the printing order are not the same. On an eight page booklet, page 8 shares a side of a sheet with page 1, page 2 shares the back of that sheet with page 7, and getting either pair wrong produces a booklet that reads backwards halfway through. There is nothing to think about here once the arithmetic is written down, which is why this belongs in a file rather than in your head: the outermost sheet carries the last page and the first, the next carries the second and the second-to-last, and so on inward. Because every sheet holds four pages, a document that is not a multiple of four gets blank halves, and this page tells you how many it added rather than silently changing your page count. Each spread is a single landscape sheet twice the width of a source page, so the printing instruction is short: both sides, flip on the short edge, fold in the middle. The imposed spreads are drawn here before anything is downloaded, which is the check worth doing, because a booklet that is wrong is only discovered after the paper is used.
How to use it
- Choose a PDF with at least two pages. It is read in this tab.
- Press the button. The page count is padded up to a multiple of four and the padding is reported.
- Every spread appears in the board as a single wide sheet. Step through them and check that the first sheet pairs your last page with your first.
- Download the imposed file.
- Print it double-sided with the flip on the short edge, fold the stack in the middle, and staple the spine.
Useful for
- Produce a program, a zine or an order of service that folds from letter or A4 stock.
- Print a chapter as a pocket booklet without paying a print shop for the imposition.
- Make a workshop handout that folds and staples, from a document written in reading order.
- Check an imposition before committing a long print run to it.
Limits worth knowing
- The sheet is twice the width of the first page. A document whose pages differ in size has the later pages fitted into that sheet rather than changing it.
- No creep compensation. On a thick booklet the inner pages creep outward when folded and the outer margins drift; a print shop handles that and this does not.
- No crop marks, no bleed, no gutter allowance for the fold.
- A page carrying a rotation entry is imposed as a reader sees it, which is the right answer and is not what every imposition tool does.
- Only saddle stitch. Perfect binding and cut-stack imposition are different arithmetic and are not offered.
Questions people ask
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