DTP: Numbering Pages, Part 7

The previous installment of this series may have raised questions about the various methods of laying out a page. Perhaps you thought about using clear or disappearing cellophane tape or spray glue on the paper. Other suggestions may come to mind as well.

However, all of these methods will take you back several decades in time. We don't have to resort to those options any more. Today's desktop publishing programs can paginate documents efficiently, and in the order that we like.

If that's the case, then why do booklets require so many folds? We have to fold a very, very big sheet of paper in order to obtain a booklet with sixty-four 6x8" pages, and it would then have to be reduced in size. Wouldn't it make more sense to print out those 6x8" pages and put them together later? Why don't we just prepare individual pages that are the size of our actual page?

The bottom-line answer is - as you may have guessed - money.

It is much cheaper to print 64 pages on a single, large sheet of paper than by passing each individual page through the printing press, especially in high volume publications. This does not apply to small-press or print-on-demand orders.

In some cases, we may have to feed a page through the printing press several times, in order to produce a colored picture. This, too, can be done far more cheaply for 64 pages in one pass than for one page in each pass.