Actually, I'm with David on this issue.
You already express that you're having page creep problems producing homemade booklet proofs on your own system. Cranking out a PDF for others to print at their locations just pushes the problems you're having off of you and distributes them across your user base.
It's not uncommon for laser printers to have as much as a pica/sixth-of-an-inch page creep horizontally and/or vertically when "centering" a page to print on both sides with a duplex laser printer. If you're doing it yourself, with careful attention and experimentation, you can apply a little Kentucky windage and make adjustments to get reasonable results on your system.
But there's absolutely no way to predict how that will work on other people's systems. None.
Putting it simply, you're built to lose here.
But if you're determined to do this, and willing to deal with the vagaries and quality problems with the process, it is possible.
- First, forget about using the Build Booklet function to make it easy on you. The only way this is going to work is to manually build it on your own.
- Design your pocket-size InDesign pages as single pages in your 3 1/2" X 5 1/2" deep specification. That's seriously close on the long end of your 8.27" x 11.69" specification, because it doesn't account for "gripper space" for the paper to be pushed through various laser/inkjet printers.
- Loose tolerances can result in parts of the impression area not being printable, so use relatively wide margins. I'd suggest 1/2" high, low and outside, and 3/4" for the inside margin. Stay away from using things like page impression-width horizontal rules and bordering boxes which will clearly call out your crime when final pages are home-printed.
- Create a signature layout document with InDesign to account for your 4-up, 8-page imposition. For a good example — and a lot of important information on page imposition and book signatures, I'd suggest you go here and read/re-read it until you fully understand it:
Understanding and Working with Print Signatures - Designers Insights
- That works fine when you're doing an 8-page booklet. But what if you're doing a 56-page one? First, you need to create your booklet in multiples of eight. If you don't have a page count in a multiple of 8-pages in your pocket-sized InDesign document, you'll need to add blank pages until you do, and account for them when you transfer your pages to your signature layout InDesign document. Then you need to create a folding dummy to know how to position all those pages in your signature layout InDesign document. For a good explanation of how to create a folding dummy for your pocket booklets, go here:
Planning a layout with dummies
- This shows how to do an eight-page booklet. For a 56-page version, just fold up 7 sheets of paper, put them all together like a 56-page booklet and number them from 1-56.
- Now, copy/paste pages from your pocket-sized InDesign document into the corresponding positions in your signature layout InDesign document, based on your folding dummy. Print to test that your folded page signatures lay out the way you expect them to. You'll notice that you likely have misalignment both left-to-right and top-to-bottom in your folded/trimmed booklet. All your user base likely will too, though their misalignment problems will vary widely.
- Finally, after you create your correct signature layout InDesign document and turn it into a PDF, you're going to have to write some kind of explanation for your user base so they can understand how to create that 8-, 16-, 24-, 32-, 40-page (and on ad nauseum) booklet and get somewhat useful but questionable quality results themselves. In terms anybody can understand. Otherwise all your efforts are for naught.
All this is why folks are saying that you're built to lose here.
But if you're determined to take a shot, this is the best way I can think of for you to do it.
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