Cheap Impostor Users Guide

Dylan McNamee
March 17, 2013
Abstract
Note: if youre just getting started with Cheap Impostor, and are the impatient sort, please dont start here! Start at the website, http://www.cheapimpostor.com, and visit the online tutorial there.

1 Introduction
Imposition is the last step of preparing a le for printing as part of being
bound into a book or magazine. Cheap Impostor doesnt oer all the features of high-end imposition software. However, if you want to print booklets, magazines, or even books, it might be all the imposition software you
need.
The input to this program is a simple PDF le. You select whether
youre making a booklet or a book, set some parameters, and Cheap Impostor produces a new PDF le that can be assembled into a booklet or a
book.
Heres a diagram of the simplest scenario:
Well, that wasnt as simple as Id hoped. You can (hopefully) see Cheap
Impostor reorders the pages to make a booklet out of a four-page document.
Please note! If youre not paying close attention, you might think Cheap
Impostor is doing something wrong by reordering the pages. If you want
to print a magazine or a book by folding pages in half, however, reordering
the pages is a must, and in fact, is the main point of this program.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

side 1

Page 3

fold and rotate. voil: a booklet!

Page 2

Page 4

Page 1

Cheap
Impostor

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

side 2

Figure 1: Overview of imposition

2 Creating a magazine with Cheap Impostor

To create a simple stapled magazine with Cheap Impostor you rst use your
favorite application to create the content. Format the document for standard full-size paper. Select the File Print menu, and in the lower-left corner click on the PDF button, and select Save as PDF and save the le in
PDF format. Note: even though were doing 2-up printing, select 1 Page
per Sheet for the print dialogs Layout, because Cheap Impostor does the
2-up for you.
Launch Cheap Impostor and open your PDF le. Select Magazine for
the signature option. Adjust the Top oset, Inside oset, and Zoom
sliders until the contents are properly centered on the paper. Click Print
....
Cheap Impostor will bring up a Print dialog. Select Two-Sided Printing, short-edge binding. Figure 3 shows those options in Mac OS Xs print
dialog.
If you do a lot of magazine or book-making, you might want to save
this preset as something like Cheap Imposter. Finally, print your document, fold, and staple along the spine, and sell your magazine!

2.1 Printing to a non-duplex printer

If you dont have a duplex printer, open Cheap Impostor Preferences, and
select Format for: Manual duplex. This will produce two les; yourFilenameimpose-oddPages.pdf and yourFilename-impose-evenPages.pdf. First print
the odd pages, then ip the pages over along the short edge and print the

Figure 2: Screenshot of the imposition window

Figure 3: Example print dialog (varies between printers)

even pages. Depending on how your printer collates, you may have to select Reverse odd pages in Cheap Impostors preferences to get things to
work out right. Experiment on a short document before you print your
huge book this way!

Figure 4: Cheap Impostor preferences

2.2 Special formatting (inserting blank pages)

If you want the rst page of the document to appear anywhere besides the
front of the rst signature, you can insert blank pages to the beginning of
the document using the pop-up selector. This is mostly useful if you want
to glue the outermost page to something when binding.

2.3 If your fronts or backs are upside-down (a tutorial on binding edges)

As I worked on this program, I was surprised how complex page imposition turned out to be. The aspect that surprised me the most was that
there is more than one way to turn a piece of paper over. Whod have
thunk? In printing terminology, the two options are to ip the paper along
its long edge or along its short edge. Allow me to explain:
Ignoring 2-up for a moment, gure 5 shows how a portrait document
is ipped along the long edge, and a landscape document is ipped along
the short edge.
Imposition throws a monkey-wrench into things, because things are
rotated 90-degrees, so on the larger sheet of paper, portrait-mode documents now need to be ipped along the short-edge, as shown in gure 6
Why does this matter? If youre doing manual duplex, it doesnt matter too much because you will intuitively ip the page correctly. Also, if
your duplex printer driver allows you to control binding edge (as the one
in the screenshot at the beginning of this section does), you can set the

Page 1

Page 2

Page 1

Portrait layout: long-edge binding

Page 2

Landscape layout: short-edge binding

Figure 5: Long- vs. short-edge binding

Page 4

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

2-up portrait layout: short-edge binding

Figure 6: Binding edge of an imposed document

printer to match the documents binding edge (usually short-edge, as in
the screenshot). However, some duplex printers do not allow you to control binding edge, so you have to use Cheap Impostors preferences to set
binding edge to match your printers duplexer.

2.4 PDF Services - calling Cheap Impostor from your

Print Dialogs
The Preferences window allows you to install Cheap Impostor as a PDF Service. Press the button next to Install PDF service, and the installation is
complete. From this point on, the PDF pulldown of the Print Dialog will
have a Cheap Impostor item in it, as shown in gure 7.
Selecting CheapImpostor from this menu launches it with the current
document as input. You can then specify the options, zooming, oset, etc.

Figure 7: PDF services menu with Cheap Impostor installed

and click Build imposed le to produce your imposed output (saved to
your Desktop with the lename PrintJob-2upMagazine.pdf ). Please note
that Acrobat Reader doesnt support PDF services within its own Print Dialog. This is not a limitation (even though its a bit weird of them), because
you can just drag whatever PDF le you were viewing in Acrobat Reader
directly to Cheap Impostors icon.

3 Creating bound books with Cheap Impostor

If you look at the top or bottom edge of a hardback book near the binding, you will see they are made up of sets of 4-8 sheets of paper folded in
half. These are called the books signatures. If you open the book to the
center of one of those folds, you will see thread from where the signature
is sewn together. If you would like to make a book like this, use Cheap
Impostor with a signature size of 3 to 8, depending on your paper thickness. There are lots of tips about sewing and gluing, which are best left to
a good book on bookbinding. However, Ive discovered a simple and easy
way of making a book that is less work, and that I can describe brie y here.

3.1 Quick and easy book recipe

Use Cheap Impostor to impose your book using a signature size (Pages per
Sheet) of 1. Fold each page in half, and arrange them in order. Stack them
neatly, folded edges out. Get some Poly-vinyl Acetate glue (PVA), and apply it liberally to the folded edges. At this point, you might want to press
them under some heavy books (use wax paper to keep the glue from oozing onto your weights). When the glue dries, the book will be usable. Read
on for slightly more advanced features.

3.2 Slightly slower, but very cool paperback book recipe

After my second book, I decided to make a simple vise out of two 2x4s
and some long bolts with wing-nuts. I used this vise between each of the
gluing phases below.

Figure 8: A simple vise for binding books

The paperback books I like the most are OReillys perfect-bound books
theyre durable, they lay at and look good. Heres my approximation
of that binding style. Start with the quick-and-easy glued stack of folded
pages described above. Next, glue a sheet of paper against the bound
edge, with a quarter-inch wrap-around, then fold back two tabs about half
an inch long. Put it in the vise and let dry.
Next make the cover. If youre using letter-sized card-stock, youll need
to use two sheets for the cover, since just one wont wrap all the way
around the book. I wrap the overlap around the back, so the spine has
double-thickness. Wrap the tabs around the binding, then glue the cover
to the tabs. Try not to get any glue between the cover and the back of
the spine. Its okay if a little glue extends past the tab onto the rst and
last pages. Put it back in the vise and let it dry. Finally, crease the front
and back covers about a quarter inch from the spine...when you open the
book, the cover lifts away from the spine so it can easily lay at. Congratulations, youve bound a book!

Glue
1/4"

Step 1: Quick-andeasy book

Step 2: Glue
binding tab

Step 3: Glue
cover to tabs

Step 4: Crease
cover. Book lays flat!

Figure 9: Steps for binding a book

4 License and shareware

4.1 Informal license
This program is shareware. You can try it out for free to make sure it does
what you need, but after that, youre expected to pay for a registration
code. The minimum amount is $35. If you use it in a commercial environment and use it on more than one machine, you can purchase a site
license, for all the machines at your site for $99.
I havent written a formal software license yet, but of course, the software is as good as I could make it at the time, but is As Is, and use at your
own risk. Ill do my best to respond to questions and comments promptly.
All of my rights as the author of this software are hereby reserved.

4.2 Shareware features

This is my rst attempt at shareware, so Im trying to do it the way I like it
to be done. Personally, I have registered dozens of shareware apps. The
ones I like the best are fully useful without product activation. However,
I tended to register earlier and more often if the shareware fee unlocked
a feature or two I thought sounded good. (I personally abhor nag-ware
and cripple-ware.) So, I decided that Id release a fully functional program,
but add some additional features that you probably dont need every use,
but would warrant paying for if you were a serious user. Therefore, when
you pay $35, youll get a code that you can enter (Register... under the

Cheap Impostor menu), which activates the buttons that let you control:
The zoom-factor
Inside oset
Binding creep compensation
Printer centering alignment
The default settings of these buttons is tuned to make an approximately letter-sized (or A4- sized for the A4 trial) 1-up document into a 2upped, imposed document of the same paper size.
Being able to adjust these settings is pretty esoteric, so I dont feel too
bad leaving them out of the trial version of Cheap Impostor. Further, there
is at least one similar app which doesnt even oer some of the features
that are included in Cheap Impostors trial that application costs $50 and
marks on every page until you pay. So I think this is a pretty good deal.
Please prove me right!

4.3 Reporting bugs

Id like to know about bugs whether or not youre a registered user. Ideally, your bug report would be a concise description of what went wrong:
what you expected to happen and what happened in reality, along with
the Cheap Impostor settings and the PDF input le that caused this misbehavior. If possible, please try to reproduce the bug with the smallest PDF
le you can.

5 Frequently asked questions

Here I will answer questions that have been asked more than once (a lazy
persons de nition of frequently):
Q: Is it possible to set a default zoom, window position or window size?
A: Yes! The frontmost-documents osets, zoom, window-size and location are saved as your default when you bring up the Preferences window and click Save Preferences. As of version 3.3, this also saves the
sheets-per-signature setting and paper size.
Q: I cant enter my registration code! The Register... menu item is greyed
out.

A: This is because the Open window is waiting for you to select a le

to open. If you either select one and click the Open button, or just close
it by clicking Cancel, youll be able to register. Sorry about that.
Q: When I print on my Duplex printer, why are the back-sides of my pages
upside-down?
A: Please read about binding-edge in section 2.3.
Q: Doesnt the built-in 2-up feature of MacOS X do the same thing as Cheap
Impostor?
A: No! It doesnt scramble the pages into the order required to make
a magazine or book.
Q: When I use your program, the page numbers are all scrambled!
A: Yes, I know, this is what imposition is all about. Please read the Introduction very carefully.
Q: No, really, I understand imposition, and Cheap Impostor is scrambling
(page numbers, graphics, other output) in my originals.
A: This used to occur in versions earlier than 2.5. It should be xed now.
If youre still seeing this behavior, its a bug. Please let me know.
Q: If the 2-up takes two letter- (or A4-) sized pages, and puts them on one
sheet, why isnt the default zoom 0.5?
A: Ha! I thought it should be 0.5 at rst too. Then I realized that what
youre doing is taking a page that was originally (in the letter-sized case)
8.5 wide, and making it into a page that is 5.5 wide (half of 11). The
zoom factor for that is 0.647.
Q: What are those funny disabled controls in the interface?
A: Those are features that are enabled when you register Cheap Impostor. You should register if you use Cheap Impostor after your initial trial
anyway, but enabling those cool controls is the extra carrot I oer for
registration.
Q: Where are those features documented?
A: In a brand-new Advanced Features Guide, now included in the Appendix of this document.
Q: How to I uninstall a PDF Service?
A: There is an Edit menu... button at the bottom of more recent print
dialogs. Users of earlier systems will note that PDF Services are installed
in your homes Library/PDF Services folder. You can drag any PDF Services
you dont need (including Cheap Impostor) to the trash, and theyll be removed from your print dialog. Some PDF Services are installed in the toplevel Library/PDF Services folder.
Keep those questions frequently coming!

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6 Troubleshooting notes, known limitations

Cheap Impostor does not handle encrypted PDF les. The workaround is
to open your encrypted document using a PDF viewer and your password,
and print to a new PDF le (assuming it permits you to some PDF documents refuse to be printed).
If you are having problems with a speci c le, there is an eective
work-around: open the document in Preview, and print it, but select under Output options save to PDF le. This resulting le will usually work
ne in Cheap Impostor.
If les produced by Cheap Impostor arent opening properly in Acrobat, please rst try upgrading your Acrobat version (version 7 complains
about how Apple embeds fonts, for example, but Acrobat 9 seems to have
xed this). If that doesnt work, try to open the le in Preview, and either
print from there, or save to another le which may work better with Acrobat.

6.1 A note about 3.0

As an Apple developer, I received access to developer builds of Mac OS X
10.5. I was disappointed to learn that Cheap Impostor 2.61 doesnt run under 10.5. It would appear that Apples neglect of Cocoa-Java had continued to new levels. I was faced with two choices: work really hard to regain
2-year-old functionality, or rewrite Cheap Impostor as a native ObjectiveC Cocoa program and hopefully gain new features. The main feature Id
hoped to be able to provide was live preview of the imposition settings.
After some brief experiments, I determined this would be possible, and
about two months of programming on evenings and weekends, I reached
a releasable state.
One surprising thing about the switch to native Cocoa was that for
many long documents, the program is actually slower than before. My
explanation for this is that the Java version of Cheap Impostor doesnt actually interpret the contents of the PDF document, but the native version, using Quartz, renders the document into the output document. This solves
many problems the previous versions of Cheap Impostor had, but its a lot
more work, so its slower. However, I think its alleviated a bit by the ability to provide a concrete progress bar (instead of the old spinning one) so
even though its slower, you can get a good idea of how long its going
to take. Plus, the preview feature should mean you dont have to do it as
often.

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6.2 A note about 2.0

Even though the features of 2.0 are almost identical to 1.x, it was a signi cant amount of work. This is because it was pointed out to me that the PJX
PDF Parsing library I used in 1.0 is GPLd, and not LGPLd (as I had assumed).
What this meant to me is that I either had to release the source code to
Cheap Impostor (which Id like to do, but after recouping my development
eort), or paying PJXs author $5,000 up-front. Since Cheap Impostor is so,
well, cheap, I couldnt aord the latter option. Since Id like to have this
program generate at least a little spending money, I decided against the
former option. So the only option left to me was to write my own PDF
parsing library. It turned out to be not so hard: I sat down with the PDF
spec and a bunch of example PDF les, and started writing Java. In about
a day I was successfully parsing incrementally saved XREF tables. In a week
I was reading, parsing, and writing out complete PDF les. A couple days
after that I was modifying them. It took three days to integrate my old
code with the new library, and another couple days to debug. So, in two
weeks, Im releasing the rst version of Cheap Impostor 2.0.
The main dierence to you, the user, to the switcheroo is that the application is much smaller: 250KB instead of 1MB. Also, I solved the incrementally saved PDF problem, which should have been handled by the parser,
not clients of it. Finally, since Ive literally written everything, I should be
able to x bugs more quickly than before. Unfortunately, this also means
there may be new bugs: stu that used to work might not any longer. So
please let me know if you encounter any problems with Cheap Impostor:
and include the PDF (if possible) with your bug reports.
Im still indebted to Nassib Nassars PJX - it helped me rapidly prototype Cheap Impostor, and I dont begrudge him the license terms of PJX...
thanks again, Nassib!

7 Credits
Version 1 of this program was written while I was down with the u during Spring Break of 2004, and nished during a beach vacation in April.
Any Cocoa programmer must nod their heads in appreciation at how easy
Apple has made building Mac OS X applications. The community of Cocoa developers is really supportive, so I thank all of them. Finally, I must
thank my wife, Heidi and her father Denny for enthusiastically helping me
with the various bits of formulae involved in the reordering and 2-upping
calculations. This documentation was written using TeXShop and XETEX,

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with OmniGrae Pro for the gures. I admire the simplicity and power of
Omnis applications. Thanks also to Michael Tsai for DropDMG - its a great
tool!

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A Advanced Features Guide

This appendix describes the features enabled when you register Cheap Impostor. These features include page oset and zoom controls, output paper size, printer center alignment and creep adjustment.

A.1 Page positioning controls

Imposing documents youre writing yourself gives you the ultimate control: you can choose the original documents page size, and all four margins; top, bottom, left and right. If the imposed output doesnt look right,
you can alter one or more of these parameters to x it.
On the other hand, if youre imposing a PDF le with no access to the
original document the output may or may not look right after imposition.
Cheap Impostors default settings are a rough stab at what to do when
youre imposing 8.5 x 11 (or A4) originals to the same size output. If those
settings result in bad output, the zoom and oset controls are the primary
page positioning controls that will allow you to x almost any layouts.
The nal page positioning control is in the Preferences pane the printer
center controls allow you to compensate for your printer not placing its
output precisely where it should.

A.1.1 Oset and zoom controls

If the input pages original size is anything but letter or A4, youll probably want to use the zoom control to compensate. For example, if youre
imposing a document whose paper size is 5.5 x 8.5 onto 8.5 x 11, then the
zoom should be 1.0. Similarly if youre imposing A5 originals to A4 output, the zoom should be 1.0. Another good use for zoom is if the originals
margins are too large, or too small.

A.2 Output paper size

This is the simplest of the advanced features. By default, Cheap Impostors
output PDF is either A4 or Letter. If youre printing to dierent sized paper
A3, or Tabloid, for example you can use the Preferences panes output
paper size selector to choose. Note that if you grow the output paper size,
youll probably also want to increase the zoom factor.

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A.3 Creep
Creep is the last of the often requested features for future versions of Cheap
Impostor. Those of you who have asked for it know what creep is. For the
bene t of the rest of you, heres my creep tutorial.
Creep is what happens to a pages margins when you fold a large magazine in half and trim the edges. After trimming, the margins of the center
pages creep outward, and if the magazine is thick enough, or the original
margins small enough, you could actually end up chopping o text when
you trim your magazine. Figure 10 shows the basics of creep in action.

Figure 10: Folding pages causing creep, before and after trimming
Note that the center pages creep outward. When the protruding
edges are chopped o, those same center pages loose increasing amounts
of their outside margin.

A.3.1 The mathematics of creep compensation

Note: you, as a user of Cheap Impostor, do not need to read this section.
I just threw it in because I could. For the intrepid, read on! (The rest
of you may skip to section A.3.2) To calculate how much Cheap Impostor
should slide each pages margins inward, the following diagram describes
the mathematics of creep:

Figure 11: Geometry of creep

This diagram shows that the outer pages are eectively shortened because they have to wrap around increasingly large bundles of inner pages.
It is the outermost page that determines the amount of chopping (i.e., the

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extent of the creep). The total amount of creep for the innermost page
is equal to the amount of extra circumference the outermost page has to
wrap. Since the circumference of a circle is 2r, one quarter of this is r/2.
The radius, r, is the thickness of each page, t, times the number of sheets.
This gives us a formula for the amount of creep for each page, i, where i
is 0 for the outermost sheet, and is sheetcount for the innermost sheet:
creepi = (ti)/2

A.3.2 Adjusting for creep in Cheap Impostor

Creep doesnt come in to play much if youre binding a book with small signatures. But for magazines, it can be signi cant. To utilize Cheap Impostors
Creep compensation feature, click on the triangle next to Advanced options... in the Preferences window. Get a ruler, and get out a stack of your
paper, and nd a convenient (countable) number of sheets whose thickness come out to an even measurement on your ruler. Count the number
of sheets, and enter that number into the box labeled __ sheets. Convert
the measurement to points and enter the converted amount into the
box labeled __ points thick. There are 72 points to an inch. For example,
1/4 = 18 points. For the metric among us, there are about 28.3 points per
centimeter.

A.3.3 Page-centering compensation

Important note: This feature is only intended to center the paper in the printer
for auto-duplexed output. Dont try to use it to adjust the position of your
output on the page thats what the oset and zoom sliders are for. If you
need other ne adjustments of all of the pages of your document, try Previews
Crop Pages feature.
Since an imposed document is ultimately folded and bound, its important that where the paper really gets folded is where Cheap Impostor
thinks it will be folded. It turns out that some printers output is oset
either horizontally or vertically or both.
The preferences pane has printer centering controls that compensate
for o-centered printer output. To determine what values to put into these
controls, click on the small triangle next to Advanced options... from the
Preferences window. Next, click on the Print calibration page button.
This open a PDF le that you should print in duplex mode on your printer.
When its printed, fold the paper in half horizontally, then atten it and fold
it in half vertically. If the horizontal and vertical lines match the folds, then

16

your printer is aligned. If not, then count the number of tick-marks both
horizontally and vertically that your folds are o, and enter those values
in the centering controls. To check your work, after entering the numbers,
repeat the process the alignment marks will be oset by the amount
youve entered, so they should now be centered.
Remember: if the vertical fold is to the right of the vertical alignment
line, the X oset is positive, if its to the left X is negative. If the horizontal
fold is above the horizontal alignment line, the Y oset is positive, if its
below Y is negative.

a) Advanced preferences

b) Zoom-in on center of
alignment page

Figure 12: Advanced preferences, calibration page

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