8 Replies Latest reply: Sep 4, 2008 10:03 AM by Al Ferrari RSS

    No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?

    Daryl Pritchard Community Member
      Hello all,

      I'm just getting my feet wet with InDesign CS3, doing my first book design for a book my sister is writing. All is going well except for what strikes me as a significant problem with how ID CS3 handles the inside bleed for a document with a facing pages layout. Namely, as the workspace provides no bleed zone, any image placed such that it should only spill into an inside bleed zone instead overlaps the document centerline and onto the facing page. The result when exporting a PDF is that the portion of the image that should be lost in the trimming of the document is instead kept as a presumably desirable part of the printable facing page's content.

      By reducing the margins or bleed zones, one may be able to keep the image from crossing the crop line of the facing page, but barely. In many cases, even if some part of the image was carried erroneously onto the facing page, it might disappear in the binding of a book, but not necessarily.

      The topic of http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b61782/0 appears to be about this same issue, which finds me begging the question if despreading the document (if I understand this meaning to split the document apart) is truly the only solution? Is this a new problem introduced by InDesign CS3 or it is a problem that has always existed yet been ignored? It just seems hard to believe that this kind of thing would be allowed to happen.

      I suspect the experienced InDesign users here will know what this problem is all about, but for those new to the application like myself, the image provided at http://ambress.com/indesign/IDtoPDFerror.jpg illustrates what is occurring. With my goal being to produce a single press-ready PDF, the only solution I have found consists of 6 steps:

      1. Export the full book as PDF
      2. Delete the image and print the current spread, so the facing page exports to a usable PDF with the same printer's marks.
      3. Restore the image and disable the facing pages document setup option, confirming the inner/outer margins are correct for the left or right-hand page that provides the image. This will again ensure the printer's marks remain correctly positioned.
      4. Export the image page to PDF
      5. Replace the two pages of the full book PDF with the two singly exported pages.

      While this process is relatively simple to do, and not so bad if there are only a few such pages to deal with, I still must say, surely there is a better way?

      Thanks,

      Daryl
        • 1. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
          BobLevine CommunityMVP
          Well hello Daryl. Fancy meeting your here. :)

          The first thing we need to address is how this book is to be bound. If
          it's going to be saddlestitched then you should have no inside bleed at all.

          Spiral bound or perfect binding might require some of the workarounds
          discussed in other threads.

          Bob
          • 2. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
            Al Ferrari Community Member
            http://indesignsecrets.com/breaking-pages-apart-to-bleed-off-a-spine.php
            • 3. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
              Daryl Pritchard Community Member
              Hi Bob,

              Yeah, I never anticipated using InDesign, but a taste of MS Publisher 2007 led me on to a better path, although Publisher "ain't bad".

              My sister has yet to make a final choice of hardcover or not, but that is the direction she's heading. I'm not familiar with what is meant by "saddlestiched", but would assume any references to a stitched binding means exactly that. If so, then I believe that too is the plan, if a hardcover book is chosen.

              The printhouse she is likely to use has provided me a rough template of what they need, where crop marks are defined for all 4 sides of the pages, and thus a bleed seems implied by that. I sent them a sample of m document in PDF, and they said all looked good, and that there should be no issue with the full bleed images, even with the "problem" as I've written of here.

              Not knowing just how truly accurate book the trim of the pages are, if there is no inside bleed (not sure if you mean no bleed zone, or the image itself does not bleed past the page edge), it seems to me that if the paper was trimmed short of the crop marks, a strip of white would be seen. If overcut beyond the crop marks, clearly that would not be a problem. And I realize too that even a thin strip of white for an undercut (my lingo, not knowing the terminology yet) could easily end up hidden by how the pages are bound. In the end though, regardless of the binding, the mere fact that this situation arises still seems a true problem with how InDesign handles facing pages and image layout.

              Back tonight to catch up on this...thanks.

              Daryl
              • 4. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
                Community Member
                I recently encountered this same issue with a perfect-bound catalog I made. The solution was very simple: the printer told me not to worry about it. They took care of it on their end and the binding was...er...perfect when I got the finished copies. I suspect your printer would do the same. (Saddle stitching means the spreads are stapled in the center and the whole book then folded in half.)
                • 5. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
                  Gernot Hoffmann Community Member
                  Daryl,

                  in your situation I would edit the book on single pages
                  and add bleed at all edges.
                  You'll probably need two different master pages,because
                  the design is mostly somewhat mirrored.
                  The default master page is A-master. Add a new master:
                  B-master. Assign A-master to odd pages and B-master
                  to even, by numbers (I didn't find an automatism).
                  The imposition should be handled by the printer (the
                  prepress folks).

                  It seems you don't believe that for some binding
                  concepts there is no bleed in the gutter. The pages
                  are not trimmed there. This comes from the fact that
                  a right page is connected to a left page on one paper
                  sheet, but it's not the one which is visible in the
                  'facing pages editing mode' (exception: the center
                  sheet).

                  Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann
                  • 6. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
                    Daryl Pritchard Community Member
                    Thanks all...not much time for a reply right now, but the link Al provided will be helpful reading. And Gernot, there's clearly a lot I don't know and even the term "gutter" was not familiar to me yet, with exception of how that is often applied to the separation between columns in a multi-column page. Seeing that the area of the spine is the gutter, the concept is the same. So, in that lingo, I'd say that yes, I expected bleed into the gutter would be allowed, yet never would I expect it to extend into the printable area of the facing page.

                    I've not worked with master pages yet and what you say about using left- and right-page masters sounds as if it would work. For now, given that I only have 3 such pages where a full bleed is used, my approach looks as if it will work to exporting those pages to individual PDFs and use Acrobat to replace the original pages in the full book PDF with those.

                    Thanks,

                    Daryl
                    • 7. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
                      Gernot Hoffmann Community Member
                      Daryl,

                      indeed, 'gutter' seems to have two meanings:

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter

                      Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann
                      • 8. Re: No Allowance for Inside Bleed of Facing Pages?
                        Al Ferrari Community Member
                        >(Saddle stitching means the spreads are stapled in the center and the whole book then folded in half.)

                        No, that would then be *stitch and fold* binding. True Saddlestich binding is done by inserting folded signatures and then stitching on a *saddle*, followed by trimming 3 sides.

                        The second method yields a flatter book. Often, the first method is not followed by trimming 3 sides. But the main difference is the sequence: fold, insert, stitch, trim.

                        Al