Print Collection

Those who have ever prepared or imposed pages for print will know that it’s not a task for the faint hearted. But if you aren’t familiar with the process of ‘imposing’ pages, the principle is actually relatively straightforward. Take this magazine, for example. The pages aren’t printed individually and then bound together, in fact the magazine is printed in sections of 32 pages on large sheets, with 16 pages on each side, that when folded, trimmed and bound appear in the numerical order you see them here. This doesn’t just go for magazines; even small items, such as business cards, are imposed a number of times to fill a larger sheet, mainly to reduce the cost.

Quark’s Print Collection suite comprises a number of tools for QuarkXPress 7 that streamline the process of preparing pages for print and then automate their imposition. You get three elements in the box – Item Marks, MarkIt and Quark Imposer – which are all XTensions that add functionality to XPress.

Item Marks, as its name suggests, allows you to add printers’ marks to selected items or groups of items on your pages via a simple dialog box. You can easily add such items as trim and bleed crop marks and guides, registration targets and also text information, such as the job description, along with colour or grey bars. All of Item Marks’ effects could be achieved manually, but it does automate the process very well.

MarkIt does a very similar job to Item Marks in terms of adding essential printers’ marks to items, but it adds the information to the XPress page when it is output to a printer rather than physically adding the elements to the page, so your layouts aren’t altered in any way.

Accessed via XPress’s Edit menu, a dialog box allows you to set up a MarkIt ‘style’ that you can apply to a page when you output it. You can specify crop and bleed marks in the Style options, and you can also visually drag elements, such as colour bars and registration marks, onto a proxy image of the page, giving you a visual representation of how you’d like the final output to appear. Once you are happy with your style, you can save it and easily apply it to subsequent pages.

Both Item Marks and MarkIt are handy tools, but offer little in terms of a vast improvement to your workflow, so Quark Imposer is really what you are paying for here.

Imposer aims to take the tricky and time consuming business of imposing pages for print and streamlines the process from within the document. The useful tool offers the option of 2, 4 or 8up imposition types, work and turn and work and tumble for 4up and 8up respectively, plus a split web option for 8up only. It also allows for saddle stitch, perfect bound or stacked publications. There are also myriad other options available, such as bleed, creep and crossover, as well as a really handy imposition preview window to check the results before you commit to print.