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technical industry jargon assistance
Hello CreativeCOW Community,
I am relatively new to desktop publishing, but am off to a great start. I have recently been asked about adapting a periodical that I am responsible for laying out 3 times a year in a new format. The format is that one side is english and when you flip it over the other side is spanish. So the bottom of one side is the top of the other. Does anyone know what this is called? Also, I am unable to determine if InDesign is setup to do this automatically with a check of a box because I don’t know what it is called. If InDesign isn’t capable of this, does anyone know how to masterfully make InDesign do it?
I hope this isn’t a dumb question. My two decades in the Marines taught me there is no dumb question, but I tend to disagree sometimes.
Joshua Roth
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3 Replies
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Don’t know the name for such a layout, but it should be simple to do by making two separate InDesign documents and combining the output PDFs with Acrobat, outputting one language PDF in reverse page order and rotating the pages 180 degrees. Easy enough to try it out with a couple of dummy documents.
In essence, you’ll need Acrobat to combine the two language PDFs into a single publication. If outputting in reverse order directly from InDesign turns out to be difficult, you can always rearrange the pages in Acrobat. There’s a script for reversing page order here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/300586
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Like Kalle before me, I do not know of any jargon or term to describe this…
Further, I have recently started using InDesign (ID) with any kind of depth, so I can just start to be called a beginner. 🙂
My solution would be to keep everything inside ID:
* I would make two single page ID files, one the English and one the Spanish.
* I would then make a third ID file that has two pages of the appropriate size.
* With the third file open and the other two closed, I would use File Explorer to drag one of the closed files to page 1 and the other to page 2. NOTE: File > Place… works, too, but I am lazy.
* Finally, I would rotate page 2 180 degrees. (Full-on American here – I’d have the English on page 1 and the Spanish upside down on page 2 since I can’t read it anyway.)
I see a couple of benefits to this method:
1) Faster workflow. I generally find it faster to work in one program if I know how to use it sufficiently.
2) Editing the individual English and Spanish files reflects in the combined file when you open it and update links when ID asks you.
3) One single output step to PDF from ID rather than combining in Acrobat.
Final thoughts: I automatically started to think about the publication being sent to an outside printer – that is, after all, how most people use ID. However, I print over half my work in-house. If I were going to print it myself, I would NOT rotate the Spanish page and instead tell my printer to duplex the print by “flip paper on short edge”. This would also work from any program, btw.
Hope my ideas helped.
Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.meI am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂
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Thanks for the great ideas. I have gotten useful ideas from both. I have since made it work, and it is going to come out great. I have heard two names for this kind of layout: 1) flip book and 2) turn for Spanish. I do hope there is a more technically-correct name for it.
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