Imposition

To make a book or zine, you need to lay out your PDF pages onto the bigger sheet you're printing on, and arrange them so they print front and back and end up as a booklet. This is called imposition. You can do it by hand with scissors and glue, or you can use Photoshop or Illustrator or other graphics program, VERY manually. Or you can use InDesign, with imposition templates set up manually, often after making a mockup/dummy version of the book.

Software resources

Imposition can be done manually, by making a book dummy or pasting analog sheets in place. Publishers at scale typically use software to lay out the pages.

• Adobe InDesign is commonly used for imposition, and publishers often manual templates which import content from other InDesign files, and rotate the pages to meet specific paper size and trim size needs.

• Spectrolite , a free Mac app that also does color separation, has imposition layouts.
• Imposition Software
• Quite Imposing or Quite Hot Imposing
• Imposition Studio by Devalipi
• Pitstop Pro
• VIPriser
• Bookbinder JS
• PDF Snake Browser based imposition software