A New Way to Make Vertical Spreads
DTP Tools, the makers of plug-ins such as History, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Cross References has a trick up their sleeve that they’re about to release on the industry: The ability to rotate whole spreads 90 degrees to make vertical spreads — where one page is on top of the other. They recently announced that this feature will be in the 2.0 upgrade to their already-impressive Page Control plug-in.
Page Control 1.0 currently does the impossible by allowing you to have more than one page size in a document. Want a letterhead page next to a business card-sized page? No problem. Or five different sized ads in a single document? Or a tri-fold with the last panel appropriately more narrow than the rest? No problem. It’s only 59 euros (about US$85 these days) and it seems to work quite well, even when exporting PDF files for print.
But DTP Tools recently announced on their forum that version 2.0 will support vertical spreads suitable for making calendars. They also noted that it will be available pretty soon! I would say, “watch that space (and this one) for more news.”
I can’t imagine how they are doing this, but at first I didn’t believe Page Control would work either. It reminds me of that classic line in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
My hat’s off to them for making impossible things somehow possible. I look forward to testing the plug-in (and hearing from any of you who will be testing it).
It is neat indeed (though I have no need of this myself). And I guess it’s testament not only to the ingenuity of the DTP Tools folks, but also to the powerful plugin API of amazing InDesign itself.
I’ve used the plugin before, to make a different size card attached to a cover (fold-in) and it works like a charm, like you said also with exporting to pdf. I can recommend it to anyone using different sized pages in a single document.
I use page control ands its great. Really looking forward to the update. Strangely before I bought it I asked about vertical spreads being added, and as a result bought the current version as updates are free.
I tried the demo of Page control a while back and perhaps I should check it out again. I had issues with it as it messed up the whole way new pages were made.
I also didn’t like the way it output trim marks for the short pages ( they came out at the standard page size of the spread), but perhaps this has been fixed?
Update: Page Control 2.0 is now in public beta.
OK David, I downloaded the 2.0 demo but for the life of me can’t figure out how to use it. They should have included a manual or at least a get started demo.
Change page orientation does nothing.
>OK David, I downloaded the 2.0 demo but for the life of me can?t figure out how to use it.
Use the fly-out menu of the Pages panel!