How can I print the odd page spreads than the even page spreads when printing a booklet in InDesign?

Question

I've created a 40 page photo book in InDesign. They are 8.5X11 portrait facing pages and I'm printing the book using the Booklet printing dialog onto 11X17" paper with 2 page signatures on the front and the back sides of the paper. I'm printing from my iMac to a Canon Pro-1000 printer from InDesign using Print Booklet. When I print, I have to feed a sheet into the printer and wait for it to print than flip it over and print the next spread onto the back of the paper. I'm wondering if there's a way to configure the booklet print dialog that would enable me to print just the front side spreads first, with the 10 sheets of paper loaded in the top feed and automatically fed, than specify the spreads for the backs of the sheets, flip the pages, load them up and print them? I tried to specify a page range to print (such as the first spread, pages 1 and 8) using various notations such as 1-8, 1,8, etc, but it just printed out page 1 with a blank next to it and then page 8 with a blank next to it.

Is there a way to specify a spread like 1,8 6,3 for the front side spreads on two sheets and then 2,7 4,5 for the back side spreads for my first signature? God, I hope so!

I did some research and tried outputting the file to a postscript file and import it into Adobe Acrobat to create a PDF for printing, however I was disappointed in the print quality... it gained contrast and the color was slightly off. My settings might not have been accurate for outputting to the .ps file, or the images suffered from going through too many conversions.. I don't know.

Printing directly from inDesign, I use a specific icc profile for the printer/paper combo and it prints beautifully. When I print the PDF file, I use that same profile, but I get the added contrast and slight color shift. Any ideas anyone? Help! I want to make 6-8 of these books and can't see loading and turning each sheet of paper one at a time!!

Answer 1

You are having issues printing an imposed 2-up saddle stitched document through the inDesign Print Booklet dialog. From Adobe:

To print fewer spreads than the entire document:

If you don’t want the entire document to be imposed, select Range in the Setup area and specify which pages to include in the imposition.

Use hyphens to separate consecutive page numbers, and commas for nonadjacent page numbers. For example, typing 3-7, 16 imposes pages 3 through 7 and 16.

Process for a printer without automatic duplexing (From the Print Booklet dialog):

Printing double-sided pages without a duplex printer

Use the Odd Pages Only and Even Pages Only options in either Adobe Acrobat or InDesign. After one set is printed, flip over the pages, load it in the printer, and print the rest of the pages. For best results, print a test document to see which direction and order the pages should be added to the printer.

If this is not working, there may be an issue with your printer settings.