Pardon the Imposition
page 2

QuarkImposer

Quark acquired the ALAP product line in early 2006. ALAP’s imposing products have become a mainstay of many companies over the years, and the renamed QuarkImposer of the Quark Print Collection is no exception. QuarkImposer, previously known as Imposer Pro, has a new look for its QuarkXPress 7 release.

The dialog boxes are still very intuitive — you shouldn’t have any problems adjusting to the new user interface. QuarkImposer also has the functionality to edit bleed, creep, crossover, gaps, and margins within one window, making it easy for the user to quickly edit these values, and any of the edits you make to these values in the layout pane of QuarkImposer are easily viewed in the preview pane. Another nice inclusion is the bundling with MarkIt, Item Marks, and QuarkImposer for Acrobat. The regular version of Imposer has been discontinued, but this shouldn’t be much of an issue considering the Quark Print Collection will give you more for your money.

To impose pages, you’ll start in the layout tab by selecting either a two-up, four-up, six-up, or eight-up flat with the desired binding. Standard, work and turn, work and tumble, split web, or sheet-wise are available in the drop-down menu.

Using the work-and-turn option will produce flats where the pages are turned from left to right to accommodate the manner that the paper is fed through the press. Work and tumble arranges the pages top to bottom to accommodate paper that is tumbled before being fed through the press to print the second side. Only available in the eight-up configuration, split web allows you to impose for a web press. While using split web, you can specify the number of roll stands required for your project by changing the number in the sheets field. Using the sheet-wise layout, you have either four-up, six-up, or eight-up plate sizes, the XTensions module will create different plates for each side of the press sheets. Sheet wise can also be used when using a web press to produce full signatures that create one signature on a web press. Changing the units fields corresponds to the units that are produced while using sheet-wise printing.

All of your settings can be easily saved for future use with the styles drop-down menu. Simply choose add and give your style a name. In the future, when you have a similar project come across your desk, you just select that style and all of the same settings will appear.

In previous Imposer versions, one of the more cumbersome elements of the Imposer XTensions software module was using the printer’s marks and color bars. You did have the option to turn the marks and bars on or off but that was the extent of it. Fortunately, QuarkImposer is now bundled with MarkIt to allow for customization of both the printer’s marks and color bars on your imposed document. At the bottom of the QuarkImposer dialog box, there is a button allowing you to quickly switch to MarkIt.

The process of page reordering could benefit by allowing the user more customization. If you are looking for an imposition program that will allow you to order pages in any way you please, QuarkImposer may not be the right XTensions application for you, though it is possible to rearrange the pages in all of the binding types except stacked. While using saddle stitched and perfect binding, you can select where the first page will be placed and the remaining pages will automatically be repositioned accordingly. I have had some customers who want a completely custom layout type (page 1 next to page 53, for example), but the closest you can come to this is selecting None for the binding type. This will let you choose what page you would like to place and where, but only within the two flats that are in your preview screen. In other words, if you’re using a four-up layout, you can place pages one through eight anywhere you please, but above page eight is not an option.

Rather than rearranging the document pages inside of QuarkXPress, QuarkImposer works in the print stream to create printer’s flats. This is a nice feature to keep your QuarkXPress document in its original state and since pages are not moved, you don’t end up with very complex linked text box chains.

For this article, I was working with QuarkImposer and saving an 80-page document in four-up flats to a PDF. While going through the printer options you will want to make sure that you do not use the generic Mac OS PDF option. QuarkImposer requires the output device to be PostScript compatible and the Mac OS PDF option will not work. To generate a PDF from QuarkImposer, you will need to use an application such as Acrobat Distiller.

For testing, I ran my 80-page document through QuarkImposer with a basic four-up configuration, saddle stitched, 12pt bleed, 2pt creep, and 0.5” margins. Printing to a PDF took only a couple of minutes. Initially, looking at the newly generated PDF, I found some gaps in gradient boxes that were not part of my layout. These were just artifacts created by the zoom in Acrobat and the layout seemed to print fine. I also ran the same document in a two-up position with perfect binding and two-up with none selected for the binding; all imposed quickly and as expected. This is a mid-range XTensions module when it comes to imposition, and though far more advanced than Bookletizer, it may not meet some printer’s needs — especially those requiring larger flats.

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