A
A-2
Basics of Imposition
Basics of imposition layout
Commercial offset printers and web presses use wide rolls of paper and large printing
plates capable of imaging numerous pages on a single sheet. For example, it is common
for such printers to image up to 32 full-size pages on a single press sheet, a process
inherently faster than printing a single page at a time. DocBuilder Pro allows you to
image multiple pages on a single sheet, but the output devices it supports are digital
color copiers, rather than traditional printing presses. In this manual, the paper on
which a job is imaged is referred to as the sheet.
The printed sheet is folded into something resembling a booklet with connected pages.
The folded sheet, called a signature, is then trimmed to the finished size.
For pages to appear in normal reading order and position in the final booklet, their
ordering and positioning on the sheet must differ from the normal book-reading order.
You can demonstrate this for yourself using an ordinary sheet of paper.
T
O
MODEL
AN
EIGHT
-
PAGE
BOOKLET
1.
Fold the paper in half horizontally.
Fold the top edge of the sheet down to meet the bottom edge.
2.
Fold the paper again vertically.
Fold the left edge of the sheet over to the right edge. Now you have a miniature version
of a signature.
