by Mike Swope, Posted 2/9/04

Everydesigner's Tale

One of the largest annual projects that we undertake in our creative services department is annual Benefits: summaries and workbooks that span several business entities for our parent and sister companies. Every year, these Benefits projects create noise for our group. Not good noise. Noises of dissatisfaction from the customer, noise that It-could-be-managed-better. No year that we remember has been any different. This year, the Benefits project fell onto my shoulders. I did not relish this "opportunity." The Benefits documents promised to be grizzly to wrestle with. I grimaced at the thought of chasing down all those files and fonts that were sure to be missing, since the Benefits projects were last completed by a designer who had since departed but who did not follow good project and archiving practices.

I wrestled with fonts and Adobe® Acrobat®. I wrestled with missing images. I wrestled with inconsistent layouts and inconsistent stylesheets. I wrestled with bookletized documents. This last was the most time-consuming, manually converting documents from printer spreads to single-paged documents to produce coherent Acrobat proofs for the client. Luckily, the print vendor we had chosen to print the documents did not require documents in printer spreads. So I could send them to the printer in single-page format and keep them in single-page documents for our group for next year. In the design business (any business really), it is better to think ahead than complain behind. All was well.

Until I needed to print several dozen finished booklets on an in-house color Xerox printer/copier.

This task, of course, required printer spreads. Previously, we had used Bookletizer from Vision's Edge to generate the printer spreads. However, since we had recently upgraded to QuarkXPress 5, our copy of Bookletizer was incompatible, and no compatible version had been released. So I had yet another dilemma on my hands. Even QuarkXPress 6, the industry leader, disappointingly and surprisingly, doesn't perform this operation without a third-party add-on plug-in. I believed I had to bookletize the documents manually -- a dry, boring, thankless task.

Imposer: The Ingenious Happy Ending to This Designer's Tale

After a couple hours of Internet research to find a Bookletizer update, I gave up that ghost and searched for an alternative, and discovered the ingenious Imposer from A Lowly Assistant Production (ALAP). In a matter of minutes, not hours, I had printed a properly formatted booklet as a proof, and printed the final document across the network to the in-house color Xerox 2045 printer/copier. Imposer saved me time and headaches, and enabled our group to meet the tight deadline for the project. And saved the client money, too, since we charge an hourly rate.

Imposer is a Swiss-knife plug-in for QuarkXPress 3.32-6.0 to print documents into 2-, and 4-up (Standard version), and 8-up (Pro version) imposed sheets, the output needed by commercial printers for large parent-sheet presses. In addition to mere standard imposition, Imposer Standard and/or Pro also outputs in work & turn, work & tumble, split web and sheet wise format, and accomodates for saddle-stitching, perfecting binding, spiral binding, comb-binding, and three-hole punching, as well as single cut sheets. Imposer also has the ability to specify the number of pages in a signature and control plate margins, crossover trapping, and creep. Users can also save frequently used settings as imposition styles to reduce redundant labor, and even export these styles to share with other Imposer users!

[Note: It is dismaying that Quark has not built this imposition or similar feature into XPress. Commercial printers with larger presses can't be expected to produce finished products without the ability to output imposed pages. We should also remember that PageMaker offered the booklet function as early as v4 in the early to mid-1990s. So despite XPress's dominance in the page layout industry, Quark still may not fully understand the needs of the marketplace. Hence the general tone of the media that XPress 5 & 6 are not feature-rich significant upgrades.]

If You're Not Imposing in the Print Stream, You're Working. Hard.

Although any such utility is sure to offer similar features, Imposer stands out in the mind of this designer. Bookletizer, the plugin we had used previously to prep booklets for printing, actually alters the QuarkXPress document into printer's spreads, which cannot be undone easily. It is a dull, manual procedure to convert bookletized documents back into reader's spreads or single-pages. By comparison, Imposer does not disturb the layout of the document. Instead, Imposer works its magic in the print stream, leaving documents unscathed. In fact, Imposer performs as a separate command resulting in an alternative print dialog box, allowing a single document to be imposed in many different ways depending upon the clients' and printers' needs. The other attractive feature of Imposer is that it has been kept up-to-date with each release of XPress. Bookletizer's development cycle apparently ended at XPress 4.0.

Imposer comes in Standard and Pro versions for both QuarkXPress 3.32-6.0 and InDesign 2.0-CS. Fully-functional 15-day trials are available for download from the A Lowly Apprentice Productions web site. For creative groups, advertising agencies and small-format commercial offset and digital printers, Imposer Standard offers features that are likely to be used regularly. For large-format commercial offset and digital printers, Imposer Pro will be indispensable. Among the differences between the Standard and Pro versions is that the Standard version allows a maximum of 4-up sheets; the Pro version allows a maximum of 8-up sheets and additional settings for binding, printing presses, and other characteristics suitable for professional printers. Both versions (Standard/Pro) also allow placement of custom marks in conjunction with MarkIt XTension, a high-powered output alternative to QuarkXPress' standard registration and crop marks, also from ALAP.

'Nuff Said. Just Do It.

If you're involved with a creative group, ad agencies, or printing company of any kind, Imposer is an indispensable tool that will pay for itself repeatedly, saving designers and pre-press professionals precious time over and over again, and providing world-class control over and flexibility with the imposition process. All by simple, non-destructive means. Download the trial version of Imposer that best meets your needs, and try Imposer for yourself. Like this designer, you're sure to be impressed with it.

Review first appeared on AppleLinks.com

Mike was introduced to Apple IIe and Mac Plus computers in the CAI Lab at Missouri Western State College. Mike went on to Wichita State University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing. While at WSU, Mike bought a Mac Classic to replace his aging Plus, and launched a marginally successful but fun freelance business, Swope Design, to pay for his Mac habit. He continues to masquerade as a freelancer under this vague pseudonym, and operates several web sites, along with his wife, including SwopeDesign.com, www.inetreviews.com, SuperPersonalized.com and ColaCollectables.com (launching February 14, 2004). Some web work for his day job has received local awards in Wichita, Kansas, and his web sites for the MacWichita Macintosh User Group and Next Consulting Group have likewise received several awards. Mike and his wife Lynette also enjoy digital photography and offer royalty-free photographs from MorgueFile.com, iStockPhoto.com and ShutterPoint.com.