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Create Books and Magazines

This lesson shows how to create books and magazines from your PDF documents. Books and magazines are created through a process called imposition, which imposes groups multiple PDF pages onto a single sheets in a new PDF document.

Create a book/magazine

Bring up the imposition dialog by selecting the Tools→Create Book/Magazine… menu item from the menu bar.

Adjust imposition settings

The imposition dialog allows you to adjust a few essential parameters:

  • Sheet Size: You adjust the sheet size onto which the source pages will be imposed. You can either select one of the default sizes provided in the popup menu, or enter custom values into the Width and Height fields.
  • Sheets per signature: If you want to create a magazine to be folded and stapled, select the Magazine option. If you want to create a perfect bound book, that consists of multiple signatures, select the size of the signature (up to 16 sheets per signature).
  • Paper Thickness: Enter the thickness of a sheet of paper. PDF Nomad will automatically calculate creep for signatures and offset page content to compensate for it.
  • Scaling: The source pages can be scaled up or down to fit the target sheet size, or can remain unscaled, as needed.
  • Gutter: The gutter value controls the amount of space added between the left and right halves of the imposed sheet. (See below.)
  • Minimum Margin from Sides: Use the margin value to ensure no part of the document's contents is clipped when printed. (See below.)

Click Done to exit the imposition dialog.

Export the imposition to a new PDF

Click the Export… button to export the imposed PDF document to disk.

Calculating Creep

When you create magazine style publications, or books with large signatures, an issue can occur due to the folding of the paper: after a signature has been folded, the inner pages will progressively creep outward. If the paper gets trimmed, the result is that the inner pages will actually be shorter than the outer pages. If the signature is large enough this may mean that some of the content at the edge of the inner pages gets trimmed off, or comes uncomfortably close to the margins. The automatic creep compensation built into PDF Nomad will counter this issue by offsetting the page content of the inner pages progressively towards the center of the paper. For this to work, the thickness of the physical sheet of paper needs to be known.

Measuring the thickness of a single sheet of paper is not practical. It is easier to take a stack of paper, measure its thickness and then calculate the thickness of a single sheet of paper from it, by dividing the measured thickness by the number of sheets in the stack. Then enter that amount into the Paper Thickness field in the imposition dialog.

Example: if you have a stack of 500 sheets, measure the height of the stack using a ruler or a caliper, then divide the result through 500. Enter the result of the division into the Paper Thickness field.