Fiery Command WorkStation

Fiery Impose Plus v1.0

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Understanding imposition layouts

Fiery Impose Plus arranges the pages of your application-specific file in the correct order and orientation for printing and a variety of binding styles to produce a bound book.

Commercial offset printers and web presses use wide rolls of paper and large printing plates capable of imaging numerous pages on a single sheet. Printers might image up to 32 full-size pages on a single press sheet, a process inherently faster than printing a single page at a time. Fiery Impose Plus allows you to image multiple pages on a single sheet, but the output devices it supports are digital copiers, rather than traditional printing presses. 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. Some pages must be printed upside down on the sheet in order for them to appear right-side-up in the final booklet, and pages must also be printed out of numerical sequence on the sheet in order for them to appear in the correct numerical sequence in the final booklet.

Make a folding model

You can make a folding model of a signature to show how the pages would be laid out on the sheet and how the sheet would be cut and folded.

  1. Fold a sheet of standard size paper in half horizontally, so the top edge of the sheet meets the bottom edge.
  2. Fold the paper again vertically, so the left edge of the sheet meets the right edge.
  3. Position the signature with the vertically folded edge to the left and the horizontally folded edge across the top.
  4. Page through the folded signature as if it was a book you were reading.
    1. Number each page sequentially, on both front and back, starting with page 1 on the front (the front cover) and page 8 on the back (the back cover).
    2. Underline each number to highlight the page orientation.
  5. Unfold the piece of paper. The image below shows both sides of the paper.

    The result is a model of the layout for an 8-page signature. Note the following:
    • The folds subdivide the sheet into areas representing pages in the final booklet.
    • Page numbers do not appear in book-reading order.
    • Some page numbers are upside down.