Getting saddle-stitched booklets printed (cheaply)

Question

I have a booklet designed for an amateur performance event. It's 12 pages saddle-stitched (stapled), 6 impressions on 3 sheets of paper. It's a small need for 500 copies, somI expect it will use copy-shop technology rather than an offset press.

When I make such a booklet at home, the "print booklet" is a special feature. A rendered PDF shows spreads as the reader sees it.

Meanwhile, only two impressions are to be printed in color: the outside cover (pgs 8,1 on one impression) and the center (pgs 4,5 where the spread is the same as the print layout).

Question 1) can I expect the print shop to take the normal readable PDF and lay out the pages on the sheets? I expect this is a print-time task.

Q2) I expect it's best if images are converted to greyscale at print-time, so I don't have to guess at the print characteristics (gamma, dot gain). Or, will this throw them for a loop?

It's complicated by the need to print two sides on one (more expensive) printer and the rest on a grey printer. I'm worried that the auto layout and booklet print is all-or-nothing, and I should be prepared to handle things. (It's a "cheap" place.)

My understanding is that I would normally have InDesign render a PDF file with the "for Print" preset, which includes bleed and crop marks. It somehow is encoded as metadata so if the printer doesn't use oversized pages it will print the right stuff, and on overised pages it shows physical marks for the trim step.

What's the reality? Anything else I need to know?

Answer 1

A lot depends upon...

• how many books are being published
• where the color pages fall within the book
• how many pages in total the book has
• if it's a self cover or not

It is most often more cost effective to run everything as 4 color. For most shorter run publications, everything is printed in color, even if some pages only use the black plate.

If your color pages fall on various signatures, you'd have to run it all 4 color anyway. So without an exact page count and specifications as to where color pages fall, no one can definitively state that it may be possible to run part of the job as 1 color and part as 4 color. Often it only makes sense to split the run if it's a very large page count and all the color pages fall on the same signature - and even then only if there's a large number being published.

Your greyscale images should be black only (Photoshop Greyscale mode) when placed in InDesign. Commercial printing customarily doesn't pick and choose images to convert to greyscale if there is also color in the piece (see paragraphs above).

In you are considering an online publisher... they run everything RGB or CMYK... even if it looks greyscale.

For commercial press, you would just export a PDF/X-1a format file with marks (bleeds/crops) from InDesign in reader spreads. I don't know what you're going on about with respect to metadata and oversized stock. Most commercial printing is done on stock larger than the final size, then trimmed down to meet desired dimensions. In cases where there is a bleed, that is the only way to get quality reproduction.

You should possibly have a conversation with your print provider. They may be able to give some specific settings or steps which would help you with your specific project.

Answer 2

Our office printer MX-3140N would be able to do that and staple the back. It will differentiate between B/W impressions and color, so I simply send it a PDF with 12 A4 pages, and tell it to do a booklet on folded A3 paper. It will autodetect if the page only contains greyscale, so the conversion to greyscale has to be done by you.

Our office printer is by no means a high-end printer. It cost around 5000 EUR. So I would expect that many places will have a similar printer.

To print cheaply you need to avoid spending people's time, and doing the grayscale conversion will save time.