Page ranges, rotation and scale

Three settings that act on the source pages before they reach the sheet: which pages enter the job, which way up each one is, and how big it lands. They apply in that order, and they are the same in all four modes.

Page range

By default every page in the file is imposed. A page range narrows that to a subset, written as numbers and hyphenated spans separated by commas:

• 1-8 — the first eight pages.
• 12 — a single page. This is how you pick one artwork out of a multi-page file for Step and Repeat.
• 1-8, 12, 15-20 — spans and single pages mixed.

The point of the range is that you do not have to split the source file first. Extracting pages 15 to 20 into a new PDF, imposing that, and then keeping track of two files is three chances to impose the wrong one. A range keeps the job pointing at the document it came from.

Rotation

Page rotation is 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, applied to the source page before it is placed. Two consequences follow from that ordering, and both matter.

First, rotation changes the footprint the grid has to accommodate. A rotated A4 page is 297 mm wide and 210 mm tall, so a grid that fitted three across before rotating will not afterwards. Set the rotation before you solve the grid, not after.

Second, rotation does not turn the sheet. The sheet is whatever paper format you chose and stays that way. If you want a landscape sheet, set a Custom size with the dimensions swapped — see paper sizes.

The common use is a source exported portrait that needs to sit landscape on the press sheet: two A5 pages rotated 90° stack neatly down an A4 sheet, where unrotated they would only sit side by side.

Scale

Scale is a percentage, defaults to 100, and must be greater than zero — a job at 0% is rejected outright rather than producing an empty sheet.

Two things about it are worth being precise on.

It applies to the placed page, not the sheet

Setting 65% does not shrink your A3 sheet to 193 × 273 mm. The sheet is fixed by the paper format; the placed page is what changes size. This is also why the crop marks do not scale: 5 mm of mark is 5 mm of paper at any percentage, because the guillotine works in millimetres and does not care what the artwork was reduced by.

It is proportional in both axes

There is one percentage, applied to width and height together. Pages are never distorted to fit, and there is no stretch-to-fill option. If a page does not fit the space you have given it, the honest answers are a smaller percentage, a bigger sheet, or a coarser grid — not a squashed page.

Because scaling is a transform on vector form XObjects rather than a resample, nothing degrades. Text at 40% is still text; a logo at 300% is still a curve. See format notes.

Working out a scale

Solve it against the space, not against the sheet. Take the sheet, subtract 16 mm for the marks, subtract the gutters, divide what is left by the number of pieces across, and that is the width one placed page may occupy. Divide by the page width to get the percentage, then repeat for the height and take the smaller of the two.

Four A4 pages 2 × 2 on A3 works out at 65% once the marks are allowed for, which is where the figure in the N-Up worked example comes from. Seventy per cent also fits the sheet, and leaves a millimetre of margin and nowhere for the marks — a good illustration of why the marks belong in the arithmetic rather than being added at the end.