Suppose you have PDF documents of booklets
that are almost press-ready. The pages are to be printed double-sided,
folded and trimmed. You want to make sure that the page numbers,
which are close to the edge of the page, do not get trimmed off.
Indeed, when pages are folded for saddle-stitch binding, the printed
area slightly moves outward. This is known as creep in the publishing world.
The more pages in a booklet, the larger the shift of the area of
the inner pages will be.
Figure 1. Creep moves the printed area of
the inner pages outwards, which may cause page numbers near the
outer edges of the pages to be trimmed off.
To compensate for this creep, you can create
an Action List that does the following:
- Shift the printed
area of the left-hand (even-numbered) pages 5 mm to the right.
- Shift the printed area of the right-hand
(odd-numbered) pages 5 mm to the left (closer to the binding).
- Leave the first page unchanged (for example
because this page is not numbered).
Figure 2. Changing the page layout: move the
printed area of the inner pages (B and C) towards the binding to compensate
for creep, but leave the first page (A) unchanged.