Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Basic Imposition

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, business cards don’t shoot out of the press one by one. Multiple cards are laid out on each sheet, then cut apart. If you’ve created business cards on a desktop printer, you have some idea of what’s involved. It’s fun trying to get the edges of those little rascals to line up with the perforations on your desktop printer’s output, isn’t it? That alone should give you some sympathy for the challenges faced by a commercial print service provider. They’re not printing on perforated stock, but it gives you an idea of the difficulty of trimming printed sheets exactly.

Imposing a simple business card with a plain, white background (Figure 3.13) is fairly straightforward: Line them up and cut them ...