Ok here goes, we print books 5.5 x 8.5 format on our Harris web press, black text pages only, and the format coming off our press is double-parallel folded, so we have 2 books, head to foot. Finished sig size is 5.5" x 17.5" basically. I have always used Preps since version 1. As long as I'm printing 2up (2 copies of the same book) there's no problem, I have a template numbered correctly and it has a 16pg sig (which is actually 2-16s two up) a 24pg sig and a 32pg sig. It is set up as saddle-stitched and works fine with auto select.
The problem comes when, on most of our jobs and for obvious efficiency reasons, we want to print 2 different books together on that layout instead of a single book 2up. As long as it's a single sig job, 16pg, 24pg or 32pg it works fine also, however if it was a 2 sig job, 16,24 or 16,32 or any other combination of sigs it would not work automatically set up as saddle-stitched, if I put the pages in the run list in logical order, book #1 pages 1-40 and then book #2 pages 1-40. The workaround was I did them as 2 different jobs, one for each sig, and figured out which pages would fall into each sig manually and put only those pages into the run list.
My son now handles all of the text impo work here, he had found that by setting up a template with the sigs built out into it with all the possible book lengths and using multi-sections and numbering the first pages of each section as they needed to be and using come & go or perfect bound, I forget which, instead of saddle-stitched that we could once again put the pages in order in the run list logically and get things working automatically in one job again.
Now, Preps 6 comes along and while multi-sections work, we haven't been able to find a way to set the first page number of the section to whatever we want it to be. So we're kind of back where we started.
Also, I'm looking at this and saying this is simple, black and white text only jobs, pdf, is there a way to automate this in Preps, with or without JDF, so that we would simply drop a 40pg book, or two 40pg books if they match up into a job, or product\assembly, that's already set up and have it done and finished. Or, should we just have a Master job saved for each combo\possibility and just open that master job and replace the placeholders with the actual files?
Any and all suggestions\ideas appreciated but I need to keep it in Preps cause that's what we have, unless you know of a simple way of doing this with a much simpler (inexpensive) program?
Thanks
The problem comes when, on most of our jobs and for obvious efficiency reasons, we want to print 2 different books together on that layout instead of a single book 2up. As long as it's a single sig job, 16pg, 24pg or 32pg it works fine also, however if it was a 2 sig job, 16,24 or 16,32 or any other combination of sigs it would not work automatically set up as saddle-stitched, if I put the pages in the run list in logical order, book #1 pages 1-40 and then book #2 pages 1-40. The workaround was I did them as 2 different jobs, one for each sig, and figured out which pages would fall into each sig manually and put only those pages into the run list.
My son now handles all of the text impo work here, he had found that by setting up a template with the sigs built out into it with all the possible book lengths and using multi-sections and numbering the first pages of each section as they needed to be and using come & go or perfect bound, I forget which, instead of saddle-stitched that we could once again put the pages in order in the run list logically and get things working automatically in one job again.
Now, Preps 6 comes along and while multi-sections work, we haven't been able to find a way to set the first page number of the section to whatever we want it to be. So we're kind of back where we started.
Also, I'm looking at this and saying this is simple, black and white text only jobs, pdf, is there a way to automate this in Preps, with or without JDF, so that we would simply drop a 40pg book, or two 40pg books if they match up into a job, or product\assembly, that's already set up and have it done and finished. Or, should we just have a Master job saved for each combo\possibility and just open that master job and replace the placeholders with the actual files?
Any and all suggestions\ideas appreciated but I need to keep it in Preps cause that's what we have, unless you know of a simple way of doing this with a much simpler (inexpensive) program?
Thanks
