Thanks for clearing up the ownership question Martinho.

I’m happy for anyone to use it.

It was a worthwhile investment. It saves me lots of time and helps me avoid mistakes.

Let me know where to send you a copy.

Hi David, thanks for trying this for me. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t missing something simple.

I tried using the rule below and rule above trick to start with, but as the text and the rules sometimes appear over a picture it didn’t work, as the rule above, that knocks out the rule below, also knocks out the picture.

Anyway, the solution (workaround) to my problem is:

[Flush space][minus a few hundred units of kerning][en space}Some text[en space][Flush space]
with an Underscore applied to the two Flush Spaces.

Hi David.
It’s not just splitting the pictures at the spine. It’s the moving of the pictures inside the frames. The picture on the left hand page moves 3mm to the left inside the frame and the picture on the right, 3mm to the right. This leaves you with a double image at the spine. Once the spine is ground off, the picture should then look correct if the magazine is laid flat on a table.
As the magazine is perfect bound, I don’t think creep is as much of a problem compared to a saddle stitched publication. I think the sections are 16 pages.
I hope this makes sense.

Hi Colin,

Thanks for your reply.

These were verbal specs from the printer that took us a few phone calls to clear up, as we were given different instructions from the art director when we took on the job.

We’ve been producing this magazine for about 9 years now. I haven’t spoken to the printer about this setup for a few years, but they’ve also never told me to stop doing it. Last time I specifically asked them about it, they asked me to still carry on doing what I was doing. The printer did mention that not all their clients go to this trouble, but they would prefer it if they did.

About a year ago, we produced a special edition of the magazine which was printed overseas (our normal printer is in Australia, the special edition was printed in China) and they gave me exactly the same requirements about splitting pics across the spine as the printer here wants.

You mention a cross-over between the inside cover and the first/last page of the book. This is the only occurrence that our printer says don’t do anything and just give us normal, single page PDFs and we’ll work the magic at our end.

I don’t know if this makes a difference or not, but the magazine has a print run of between 90,000 and 100,000 copies and ranges from 164 to 212 pages.