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Old 09-09-2010, 04:02 PM   #1
Robin Springall
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Ealing Common, London W5, where I duplicate CDs and DVDs.
Posts: 1,259
Default Was there an easier way?

I spent a couple of hours or so today removing some pages from a Quark booklet. That's right, a couple of hours!

The job was created some years ago (not by me) as a 44-page booklet laid out in printers pairs - these days that's often called printers spreads: Quark spread 1 was page 44 on the left, page 1 on the right (ie back and front covers); Quark spread 2 was page 2 on the left, page 43 on the right, and so on until you reach the final Quark spread which is always the centrefold spread of the stapled booklet.

The first few pages were to be kept, then I had to dump 8 pages of foreign translations. At that point I found out that there was a set of pages which I had to keep, each with three columns, all with linked text frames. Deleting the previous pages (with unlinked frames) broke the links, so all the frames after the first one just became empty. If the document had originally been laid out as readers spreads instead of printers spreads, it would have been easy (having 44 pages made it pretty hard to follow, too.)

In the end I removed just the contents of the pages which the client didn't want, apart from a frame with an exclamation mark so Quark could see they weren't empty, and Distilled the file as pages instead of spreads. The page order of the PDF was all muddled up, so I extracted all the pages in Aggro-- sorry, Acrobat, and renamed them in Bridge (where I could see previews large enough for me to work out which page was which.) I then opened page 1 in Acrobat, inserted all the rest individually in order, and saved the file as individual pages because Sharon, my printer lady, is happy to impose from pages and doesn't insist on receiving printers spreads.

So it worked but, crikey - it was a damn long-winded palaver! When I do booklets of more than 4 pages myself, I lay them out as facing pages readers spreads then Distill as individual pages - it makes future changes easy. But not this designer: she was definitely old school.

Could I have done the job more simply? I'd like to know what you think, as the charge for my work is greater than the reduction in print cost from 44 pages to 36 pages!

   
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