Today I ran into a problem with Indesign CS3. I always used the InBooklet SE plugin in the previous version of Indesign for doing simple impositions. Impositions – or so called “printer spreads” – arrange the pages in the order needed for printing. This comes in handy when creating a little book for print.

In the latest version of Indesign, this plugin has been replaced with Print Booklet. It has been replaced because the devloper ALAP of InBooklet SE has been bought by the company Quark and they dropped ALAP’s InDesign products.

The problem with new plugin ‘Print Booklet’ is, it makes it too difficult to create mock up double sided dummies. I couldn’t print to a PDF, which normally comes with Acrobat 7.0 and 8.0. So I thought it had to do with my settings, but I found a lot of users with the same problem. Somebody with no screen name on the Adobe forum says:

“My desired endproduct from imposition is always a pdf file, never a job sent directly to the printer. Generated an impositioned pdf file is now a much more cumbersome process: printing to a ps file, then Distilling into pdf.”

I even tried to convert a Postscript file to a PDF with Distiller, but the layout of the converted file was all fucked up. This makes me mad. Everybody wants the InBooklet plugin back.

I found a workaround, it’s called Booklet CE.
Booklet CE is a scripted plug-in that makes a copy of the currently open InDesign document, rearranged into 2-up Saddle Stitch or Perfect Bound or Consecutive printer spreads. Drag the scripts in the specified folders and you’re ready!