Fine tuning pagination

[Steve Rickaby]

At 15:41 -0600 21/4/08, Linda G. Gallagher wrote:

>I'm working on a book for a commercial publishing house that prints in
>16-page signatures. I've not done anything quite like this before.
>
>I need to get the book to fit into an exact multiple of 16 pages. I've done
>basic pagination control with my paragraph styles and with a page break
>paragraph style, but this calls for greater fine tuning.
>
>I'd appreciate advice, tips, whatever, on how to fine tune pagination to
>meet this need.

Two subjects:

1. Making pages beautiful

2. Making a book the required length.

FrameMaker gives you a wide range of controls you can use to balance pages:

. Ensuring that book parts have the correct basic pagination, to trim to odd/even page count or whatever

. Widow/orphan control in the paragraph designer

. 'Keep with next' option in the paragraph designer

. Manually stretching the main page flow to take lines back

. Manually shrinking the main page flow to move lines forward

. Manually bouncing paras to the top of a new page/column

. Moving large objects like figures and tables around to maximize page occupancy

. Micro-control of text, for example adding small amounts of negative tracking to pull a hyphenated word back from a page foot

The page shrink/stretch options are easier to use in a design that uses headers rather than footers.

All the above can be used to beautify pages by minimizing widows and orphans, making sure that, say, the introductory sentence to a bullet list does not lie last on a recto page, and so on. These are all about making pages beautiful. At the end of the day, though, you might have to pad out the page count to get your total page count to a multiple of 16/32/whatever. It's not uncommon to find printed books with two or even four blanks at the end for this purpose. I have even had it suggested that chapters could start on a verso page, but I don't like it. In the case of grossly excessive page count, you might even have to resort to major design changes, like setting specific sections in multiple columns (it's happened to me).

This sort of process should be done, of course, as absolutely the last thing after all text changes have been done. It is a serial process that starts at the beginning and works forward towards the end of a book because everything knocks on at least to the end of the current chapter/book part. You can do 98% of what you want with FrameMaker global controls, but you are almost always forced to 'break the rules' about local overrides to get the last 2% just right. Just live with it ;-)

-- 
Steve