Zine makers rejoice!
20 May 2023
If you’re a photographer, you’ve probably got a decent collection of photo books. You also might have dabbled with creating your own book.
As such you might have come across what printers need in terms of colour, crop marks and certain PDF requirements. But they’ll often leave you out of the tricky imposition process. If you’ve ever tried to print your own book at home you’ll know that it's not that easy. Why aren’t my pages in order when I print it out on my new colour laser printer that can do double-sided? Well, that’s what the imposition process sorts out for you. Last and first pages together on one side, page two and your second last page on the other. You’d think by now that the major layout applications would have this built in to their software. No. Sure, there are plugins for Acrobat but you need to be on an Adobe subscription to use it. And there are full-blown applications that cost a small fortune and there are apps that cost very little. But what if you just need something straightforward to use that will give you back a correctly imposed PDF in a few seconds, ready to send to that new colour printer of yours. That’s where PDF Snake comes in.
Once you’ve uploaded your PDF, choose your desired output. From here you can tweak it further by adding crop marks, centering the output and the all-important page creep (when a document is folded, the more pages you have the more the inner pages get pushed out, therefore pushing your crop marks out of alignment. Page creep allows you to gradually ‘creep’ those pages back in towards the spine). Once you’re happy with your preview (which happens in seconds) hit the download icon and rejoice in your correctly imposed PDF!
