Saving an Imposition Setup and Reusing It on the Next Job

Most print shops do the same handful of layouts over and over. A4 2-up for the reading proofs. Ten-up cards on SRA3 with 3 mm bleed and marks on. The signage gang sheet with a 5 mm gap because that is what the cutter likes.

Setting those up from scratch every time is not hard, but it is eight or ten small decisions, and each one is a chance to get it slightly wrong in a way that shows up after the run. A preset is the obvious answer — and it is also the obvious way to introduce a much worse class of error, if it saves the wrong things.

Look at the controls on an imposition panel and they divide cleanly into two kinds.

Settings about the job. The sheet size. The grid. The gap and the margin. Whether marks are on. How much bleed the artwork carries. Whether pages are scaled to fit or placed at their finished size. These describe how you work and what your finisher expects. They are true tomorrow.

Settings about the file that happens to be open. A page range like 1-4, 7. A per-page array of copy counts. Which page of the document to tile as a poster. These describe today's PDF and nothing else.

Carry a page range into tomorrow's job and one of two things happens: it selects the wrong pages, or it selects nothing. Carry a copy array and the indices land on completely different artwork. Neither fails loudly. You get a sheet that looks plausible and is wrong.

So the rule is simple and worth being strict about: a preset saves the job, never the file.

Two settings sit on the line and are worth thinking about.

Creep. It looks like a job setting — it is a millimetre value you might always want. But the figure depends on how many sheets nest inside each other, which is a property of the document's page count. A creep saved from a 64-page book is simply wrong on a 16-page one. It stays with the file. (If a tool ever takes a paper caliper instead, that would be a job setting, because the stock is yours and not the file's.)

A page rule versus a page list. "Rotate every landscape page" is a rule: it travels perfectly, because it re-evaluates against whatever document you open. "Rotate pages 2 and 5" is a list, and it means nothing against a different file. These can sit next to each other on the same panel and even share a name — which is why the distinction has to be recorded per control rather than guessed from what the setting is called.

There is a tempting shortcut: store only the settings the operator changed from the automatic suggestion, and let everything else follow Auto.

It does not work, and the reason is worth knowing. Suppose your shop always runs A4. You open a file where Auto picks A4 anyway, and you confirm it. Nothing was "changed", so a diff-based preset records nothing — and tomorrow, on a file where Auto prefers A3, you get A3. The thing you actually wanted to express, "always A4, even when Auto agrees", is unrepresentable.

So a preset should store resolved values. Applying it then means: re-derive everything from the new document, and overlay the values the preset pins. Everything unpinned adapts to the new file; everything pinned does not. That is what makes the same preset correct on a document it has never seen.

Presets are stored in your browser, on the machine you are working at. Nothing is uploaded, which is consistent with the rest of the tool — but it does mean a preset is per machine and per browser, not per account. To hand a setup to a colleague, send them the settings; to hand them the output, send the sheet.

Each control declares for itself whether it belongs to the job or the file, so saving a setup drops the page range, the copy counts, the poster page and the creep automatically, and keeps the sheet, grid, gaps, margins, marks, bleed and scaling. Applying one re-suggests from the open document and overlays the saved values, and the settings it pinned show as manual rather than automatic — so you can see at a glance what came from the preset and reset any of them individually.

Two smaller details that matter in a busy shop. Saving under a name you have used before updates that preset rather than leaving you with two identical-looking rows. And if the browser refuses to store anything — private mode, or site data blocked — you are told, rather than shown a saved preset that will not be there tomorrow.

Presets earn their keep when they encode a finishing constraint, not a preference. The ones worth creating usually correspond to something physical:

• A press sheet you actually stock. SRA3 with your standard gripper margin.
• A cutter's requirement. The gap your guillotine operator wants between pieces, and whether they want marks between them.
• A product you sell. Ten-up cards with 3 mm bleed in art, placed at their finished size.
• A proofing standard. 2-up, scaled to fit, no marks, for the reading copy that goes to the client.

Name them after the constraint rather than the file — "SRA3 cards, 3 mm" beats "Acme job" — because the whole point is that the next job is a different file.