Rearranging pages to avoid interleaving

Simple 4-up booklet imposition produces the following results:

FrontBack
141 23
85 67
 
2129 1011
1613 1415

After printing each sheet should be cut in half across the middle and at last two stacks should be interleaved to get the correct order of pages. This may take a while being done by hands, so here is a trick how to avoid the interleaving. First of all, let's create a sample 64-pages document and load it to Imposition Wizard:

Now change the width of the sheet, so it fit two pages (by default Imposition Wizard uses Step-And-Repeat layout, so you should see the following):

Then on the "Layout" page switch layout to "Booklet", turn the "Perfect bound" on, and set 1 sheet per fold (4 pages per sheet). The result should look as following:

At this point you need to perform imposing and save the intermediate result to PDF file.

Now we need to create a new project in Imposition Wizard (do not close the old one or save it before closing). Load the intermediate PDF document and adjust the size of sheet, so it will fit two pages of the intermediate file set vertically. The easiest way to do that is to choose the sheet's size equal to the size of page of the source document and then set page on sheet scale to 50%. You should see the following:

Again, Imposition Wizard uses Step-And-Repeat layout by default, so open the "Layout" page and change it to "Cut Stack". You will get the resulting document:

Define the target file name, perform imposition and print the result:

After printing cut the stack in half as before and put the first stack on top of the second one. That's all!



Automation

It is not a big problem to automate the task by using AppleScript and folder actions. The F.A.Q. has examples of "hot folder"-automation for single project that can be easily adapted to perform two-step impositions. That's why it is better to keep both projects used above.



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