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Friday, June 24, 2005

I did an 8 page spread in InDesign, when I print on our office machine to make the book the pages print out of sequence.

The mixed up page order comment you just left gives me an idea. The problem may be in how you have laid out the pages. If you set up your file with the pages in sequence, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 etc. then try to print the layout you will have the pages all out of order. The reason for this is that the pages should not be printed in order if you want the type of layout you mentioned.

It is a little hard to explain, easy to show with a demonstration. Here is what you need to do. If your document is 8 pages and you are printing that yourself, then you should put together a dummy layout first. 8 pages would be printed on 2 sheets if you are folding the paper in half. So take two sheets of paper, put them together properly, fold then as the final would be done. You now have a blank book, but it is folded properly.

Now looking at the blank book, write the page number on each page. Page one is the cover, fold on left side. Then open the book and write page 2, then the next page is page 3, etc. Now take the two sheets of paper apart and you will see that the page numbers are not following in sequence. The inside page has pages 4 and 5 on top and pages 3 and 6 on the bottom, the outside piece of paper has pages 2 and 7 on top and pages 1 and 8 on bottom. This is how the InDesign layout needs to be done.

You also need to test your printer and see which sheets of paper it prints first and if it prints both sides, and when is the second side printed. For instance if it prints the inside first then your first page would be page 4, then page 5. If it prints the back side of the first sheet second then your next page would be page 3 followed by page 6. Again, a little hard to explain but if you play with a dummy layout you should see the problem.

If you were sending the document to a professional printer, they would do the rearranging to fit their printer and you wouldn't need to worry about it.