*** From the Archives ***
This article is from May 26, 2006, and is no longer current.
Imposing Pages versus Drop Shadows
Glenn wrote:
I usually compose a booklet as single pages and then do the imposition just before making the plates. I have noticed that drop shadows created in InDesign do not rotate when the page is rotated 180º. I have to manually change the X & Y settings to negative. Although this isn’t a major problem, I was wondering if there was a way to automatically change the drop shadow.
Glenn, you are not alone. This is a frustrating problem with no push-button solution. However, my basic recommendation is to avoid doing imposition in InDesign. I much prefer exporting the document as a PDF and using one of the many tools for imposing PDF documents, such as Quite Imposing. or PDFSnake.
I just found this tutorial from Sandee Cohen at Adobe Studio, too.
One (more painful) solution some people use is to export each page as a PDF, then reimport them in to a new document. But if you don’t have a lot of this kind of thing, then I think your solution of changing the drop shadow values is likely the best.
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This reminds me that when InDesign 2.0 came out with the drop shadow feature, I sent a message to key Adobe developer warning them of this problem.
? And they reply something like : “This is the way it should be (the actual method) !”
? How that “it should be” ? I encountered the problem while I was making a packaging (90° and 180° rotated objects with shadows).
? He insisted : “This is how it should be and we won’t change that”
? Indeed, nothing changed since ID 2.0 but very often InDesign users are complaining about this angle issue for drop shadow.
There is another problem : after the shadow has been applied and then the main object rescaled so it becomes very small, shadow options are not scaled. See https://www.milic.com/indesign/bugs/images/ombreechelle.gif
Photoshop CS1 corrected this problem with the “Scale Effects” tick box in the Image Size dialog box.
One solution would be to create an Object Style which only affects drop shadows. Set the X and Y Offset to negative values of their current values (assuming the designer was consistent), and apply to all frames with a drop shadow.
I was wondering if anyone knows of a program that would take 2 or 3 InDesign documents and merge them together in to creat print spread impositions. I have to create the same manual in 3 different languages and merge them to one printer spread manual. To complicate, one of the languages has to be upside down adjacent to the English page. Page numbers are specific to the language, in other words would have the same page number as all of the manuals which is why the book feature I think would not work. Any suggestions?
I checked out the programs you mentioned but did not see where they would work for this application.
Thanks for this great resource of information. I have found this site extremely helpful.
Aleda,
For your issue of merging 2 or 3 INDD documents to create an imposition, I’d go the PDF route. Create a PDF of each document, and you (or your printer) use PDF imposition software like Quite Imposing (www.quite.com).
I love the power of Quite Imposing… but the interface is clunky, unintuitive, and lacking visuals.
I really miss Croptima InPlate :'(
Thanks for the suggestion, Steve. I did find out the PDF Snake would do the job perfectly.
I appreciate your taking the time to answer my question.
Anybody who has the same problem should give a try to Croptima InPlate, a professional InDesign imposition plugin. It automatically rotates the shadows when needed. [Ed note: This was written by someone who works at Croptima.]
Would love to, Chad… unfortunately Croptima has dropped off the face of the earth! I really miss InPlate. It was the PERFECT solution. What was the story with that, anyway? last I heard you were all giving it away free until the domain came back up for renewal. Any chance of selling it off so someone else can continue to develop it? It was so seamless… maybe Adobe would be willing to buy it off you?
Sherry, were you able to find a solution? I had croptima and loved it. Now I can’t get it to work and they’re gone. I have done millions of searches trying to find the free version croptima was supposedly providing for free before they disappeared but have not been successful.
Joselyn and Sherry and others: as Steve Werner noted above, it’s usually better to export as PDF and then do imposition in Acrobat. That said, there are a couple of tools out there that say they do imposition in InDesign. For example: https://www.indesigntools.com/idimposer/
(Though I haven’t used them. If you try them, come back and tell us what you think of those solutions.)