Assembly

There are quite a few choices you get to make about the imposition of the pages onto your printed sheets that are different based on your Printer Type, and how you plan to print and assemble your books.

The biggest difference is if your printer collates or not. If you print collated, then all the sheets of your PDF come out from the printer in order, 1, 2, 3, 4… (and each sheet is printed front and back). If you’ve printed out a document on an office printer or copier you’ve probably done this.

If you print then collate (like with risograph), first you print a big stack of sheet 1, and then a big stack of sheet 2, and so on, until you’ve printed all the pages. Then you go back and print the backs of the sheets. Then you might cut the sheets into pages, then arrange all the stacks in order pick one piece of paper from each stack (collating) and put them together into a book.

Assembly Types

Regular

If you’re printing 2-up, the printer type does not a big difference in the order the pages go on the sheet, so we just call that regular assembly.

Print collated

Most most modern desktop (ie, home/office) printers and copiers (also called Xerox machines) can take your PDF and give you a collated stack of all your pages.

That is, they can print out both sides of the paper at once and after they print sheet 1 front and back, they move on to sheet 2, then sheet 3, and so on, making one copy of each sheet. If you’ve said in the printer driver “print 10 copies” then the printer will start over and print sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3 and so on until it reaches the end of the file, and keep doing that until you have all 10 copies, each set of pages in order.

A nice thing about printing collated is when you have more than 2 pages per sheet side (for example, you’re printing 4-up or 6-up) then you can save some time and effort if you make your files so that you get multiple copies of your book with every stack of collated pages. Print it out, cut on the cut lines, then fold each stack in half and you have multiple books.

For example, if you are printing a booklet 4-up, you’ll cut it once and then have two collated books. So if you want to make 100 books, tell the printer driver to print 50 copies of your layout PDF. If you’re printing perfect bound 4-up, then you’ll cut twice and have four collated books. Remember to do the math to see how many copies you should tell your printer to make – there’s a handy calculator in the bottom right corner of the app, when you’re in this mode.

Single Copy (on a collating printer)

Choose “Single copy” for assembly if you have a collating printer and a layout with more than 2 pages per sheet side… and you only want ONE copy of your booklet. (Perhaps it is a proof copy you want to mark up, or you’re making a copy on special expensive paper, or you only ever just want one copy.)

You’ll cut your sheets into pages (keeping them in your collated, printed stack if you can cut that thickness of paper), and then do a little stacking and combining to finish the assembly.

Print then Collate

Some printing methods don’t print collated! These printers typically work off of stencils (like risograph), plates (like offset/lithography) or forms (relief printing methods such as letterpress). (See more in Printer Types.)

With this assembly method, you print many copies of the same sheet, making a big stack of “sheet 1” (as many copies as the number of books you want). Then, you switch to printing a big stack of “sheet 2”, then a stack of “sheet 3” and so on. Often this type of printer (at least those used by artist publishers) also only print one side of the sheet at once, so you go back and print the back sides of each sheet in a second pass.

Next, you make any cuts necessary, then collate the pages from the stacks to make books.

Multi Fold

You can also do a booklet layout where you make multiple folds, then trim off any extra folded parts around the top, bottom, or non-spine edges of the book.

This is only available for certain combinations of layouts of rows and columns; currently for 4-up (2x2), 6-up, 8-up (2x4) layouts. It’s great for 1-sheet signatures, and more common non-collating printers.

Special Assembly Options

While you’re setting up your imposition, you might run into a few other special cases:

Empty pages mode lets you pick what to do if there is more room in a layout than the pages in your book – in some cases, groups of 4 pages can be moved to the end of the layout where you discard them (scrap paper?) and the empty pages then don’t need to be included in the book.
Special Repeated Sheet is for non-collating printers (like risograph) where you can also avoid extra empty pages being added to your book when the number of pages in a PDF is fewer than the space in the layout. Here, you can get a special sheet (either the first or the last sheet) where you print the same file on each side, flipping the stack of pages before you feed it back in to print the backs. Print half as many copies of this sheet as your edition size.
When you’re making a Cover layout with printing on the interior, there’s a special option for non-collating printers that work with plates/stencils, to save time and money by printing the same plate/stencil on each side of the sheet. Read more about Cover Layouts with a single stencil / single plate.