Print Merge and Imposition Tool on Double Sided Cards Help Needed

Easy answer would be to run it as if it were two different single sided jobs. Then you do not have the complication of mixed fronts and backs on the same side.

For side 1: create a file of 1 page for the front. Flow it into the imposition template so that it repeats 24 times to fill the sheet. Print as many sheets as you need to print the job.

For side 2: create a file of 1 page for the back, then perform print merge on it so that you have as many pages as you need cards. Flow it into the same imposition template so that it creates as many sheets as is needed to complete the job. Then print it on the back of the side 1 sheets.

Slight problem is that you'll end up having to hand-collate the cards after you have cut them. For 100 cards that's not too bad. If you were doing 24,000 of them you would want to rearrange the serial numbers so that they come out in the order 1,1001,2001 across the top of the first sheet, 2,1002,2002 across the top of the next, so they come out pre-collated and only need guillotining.

Thanks for the idea. I don't really mind hand collation, as the order doesn't matter. But I'm printing on a digital press, and I'm concerned about everything lining up properly.

Digital presses typically have no side lay, so you have to expect and allow for about 0.5mm sheet to sheet registration error. I can't tell from the image above whether you have gutters and bleed, but proper attention to bleed and safe zone in the design should ensure a good digital press will cope with the job.

Unless digital presses have changed since I actively worked with them, they don't print front and back in a single pass anyway. All those I've ever used would print the front, eject it, tumble it and then print the back. This does not improve accuracy -- quite the reverse in fact, because the machine is registering the back and the front to opposite ends of the sheet -- which means that you must add the trimming tolerance of the paper stack to the registration tolerance of the machine itself.

The company I worked for until a couple of years ago used to print nothing but business cards -- around a hundred thousand cards per day. That was enough to completely wear out four indigo digital presses in the space of ten years. About half of them were double sided cards -- but in every case we ran the whole batch of fronts, turned them over and then ran the backs. In fact, we didn't even buy the double sided print attachment for any of those presses.

There were several reasons for that ...

• The duplex attachment would have added 20% to the cost of the press
• The duplexer would only cope with 250 gsm board, which is far too small for business cards. But printing backs and fronts separately allowed us to use 320gsm reliably.
• There was very little performance benefit -- printing a batch of 250 double sided sheets with the duplexer is no faster than separately printing 250 fronts and 250 backs.

And so you can see, we were printing fronts and backs in separate passes all day, every day, without significant registration problems, using an automated imposition process that was almost exactly like that of the method I described above.