CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • December 12, 2017 at 5:18 am #100265
    Kristen Gee

    Member

    Hi! I follow a lot of comics people on Twitter including one comics-specializing small printer in the UK. Yesterday they commented that folks should NOT set up their InDesign files with facing pages (for comics) and I asked why. They responded:

    “Basically because it messes up the bleed on the spine/fold side when making up printers’ spreads. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a faff. Better to use singles & separate master pages for any actual spreads with artwork crossing the fold!”

    Comics floppies are only 20 something pages and each issue is sort of one-off, but it’s not like they aren’t made into larger printed collections. Are there any resources out there that talk about and show the steps at prepress focusing on software, and that might, for example, show ^^^ how spreads with stuff crossing the fold is set up for print from an InDesign file?

    What about the (comparably) unexciting spreads in the likes of documents I work on, which are mainly text but have a solid color bar spanning the top of the spread? What do our printers have to do to manipulate that to get it ready?

    What I’d really like is someone’s InDesign file to look at, and into, and learn from, but yeahhhh the likes of Dark Horse isn’t gonna let me see a file of theirs anytime soon. :P Oh, or to just learn prepress from prepress folks.

  • December 12, 2017 at 5:45 am #100266
    Graham Park

    Member

    Sounds like someone us using a really old workflow. All modern workflow systems such as Agfa Apogee, Kodak Prinergy, Esko, Fuji etc all handle documents supplied as single pages.
    The workflow does the pagination and sets up the printers spreads, not something I want to do with a document to get it ready for printing.
    We normally output to PDF with bleed and printers marks, the workflow will then trim the gutter to the required specs. Anyway 20 pages staple bound is not going to be an issue even for comic layouts.
    The biggest problem with their suggestion is that for a 20pp document the inside front cover (page 2) will print opposite inside back cover (page 19) and so on. So the two pages do not relate to each other in the design only when printing. And for design it is a total pain.
    Or you do the whole document then do the pagination for the printer, but wait that is what prepress workflow systems were designed for.

  • December 12, 2017 at 8:35 am #100270
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I think Graham and Kristen are talking about different things. Graham is talking about pagination (imposition) — that is, the position of the pages. Kristen is saying this printer wants documents set up as single-sided pages not facing pages… and I think the implication is that they want bleed on all four sides of the page.

    This makes no sense to me, for comics, magazines, books, or any other document that is going to be imposed and bound — except for documents that are spiral bound (or some kind of binding where the right edge of a left-hand page does not actually touch the left edge of a right-hand page.

    There’s a discussion going on in our Facebook group about this right now, and it’s similarly mysterious and frustrating. Why would a printer ever want bleed on the inside (gutter) in a book or magazine or comic, where the two pages are coming together… unless they really do want a bit of the left page to print on the right and vice versa…?

  • December 27, 2017 at 1:50 pm #100585
    Kristen Gee

    Member

    What the heck, my reply was eaten yet again! Hmmm. Okay, to summarize… I didn’t end up seeing another reply on that tweet, but did see Graham’s post and figured this was probably something outdated too, or an old, old habit. I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt/keep an open mind but yeah, this was super strange, and I think this’ll make me second-guess myself less in general.

    Thanks for the reply, David, and thanks for mentioning the Facebook group! I just joined and had to check out the post in question, and I’m very glad that the end consensus was that… you’re printing a bound book, of course you don’t need bleed in the spine. W H E W.

  • December 27, 2017 at 1:51 pm #100587
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Sorry for the trouble, Kristen. I have no idea why our forum was holding your reply for moderation. Weird. It usually doesn’t do that.

• Author
  Posts