[Misc] A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

[Samantha]

In my company, we print a lot of individual A5 booklets with front covers on in another colour.

I have a problem, that each booklet is a different number of pages. So occassionally, I get pages printed on the back cover, or inside of the back cover which is unacceptable.

(this is printing on a ricoh MP7001)

We end up inserting blank pages at the end of documents, which is very time consuming to count and do for every document, and even then that leaves an extra white page occassionally as a compromise, which is unavoidable I know due to the layout of the booklet.

I am looking at an upgrade, and will have a machine from any company, which can put the cover on without printing on the back of it, but printing on the front - it's very complicated to explain! Does anyone understand what I mean?

Alternatively, a machine which can staple A5 Documents, as I could print everything to A5 and staple that way - but don't want to manually staple.

Please help anyone, because my boss is not happy with the current way of doing it!

[saburnsjax]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Sounds more like a problem in the way the file and/or the job was configured to print than the printer/finisher. What is the nature of the file you are printing from? Are all the pages for all the booklets in one file? What file type? How did you set up the file to print?

[Samantha]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Thanks for the quick reply.

The document is Microsoft Word. All in one document. Front page, then blank page, then the rest of pages, and the amount of these varies.

So I set it to, Booklet, Staple at Centre, Front Cover.

They are the settings - nothing complex - but I can't find anywhere else to do this.

The only option I can think of is to have it blank front cover, but each front cover is customised with a different persons name, and the inside relates to that person.

So I suppose I could Pre-Print the covers, but then we would have to be so careful to get things in the right order, when we are doing hundreds of them, as one error puts it all out. Which isn't really a risk I want to take - especially if the machine starts jamming etc.

[saburnsjax]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Ok - so it sounds like you have a document into which you are using a 'mail merge' type of feature to insert varying text, and that text may cause a given booklet to have more or less pages than a previous or subsequent booklet. Is that the case?

[Samantha]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Ok - so it sounds like you have a document into which you are using a 'mail merge' type of feature to insert varying text, and that text may cause a given booklet to have more or less pages than a previous or subsequent booklet. Is that the case?

Absolutely yes

[saburnsjax]

merge-experiment.doc

Hope that helps! ~Shirley

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Couple of suggestions. Your cover doesn't have variable data from what I have gathered.

You should pre-print them and put them in the interposer if you have one. That's what they're made for and how most people do it.

I never mail merge and then print directly to the printer anymore. One, it takes a long time with huge merge lists, and two, microsoft office often crashes the job. If you don't have adobe acrobot, get a copy and print the job to adobe pdf first. It is actually faster to "double-print" the job, first to adobe and then print the bigger compiled job to the printer. Especially with mid to high volume machines...office can't keep up with their speed at times.

Also, printing to pdf first gives you a nice snapshot of the master file and how it will look and in the event of a jam or mishap, it's much easier to restart printing at the right spot. Finally, doing also allows for last minute edits, such as rotating or deleting pages, etc.

Another alternative is to outsource the job to a printer or a bindery since they have professional equipment just for making all kinds of books. Then you can just cut a check and be done with it.

[Samantha]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Couple of suggestions. Your cover doesn't have variable data from what I have gathered.

You should pre-print them and put them in the interposer if you have one. That's what they're made for and how most people do it.

I never mail merge and then print directly to the printer anymore. One, it takes a long time with huge merge lists, and two, microsoft office often crashes the job. If you don't have adobe acrobot, get a copy and print the job to adobe pdf first. It is actually faster to "double-print" the job, first to adobe and then print the bigger compiled job to the printer. Especially with mid to high volume machines...office can't keep up with their speed at times.

Also, printing to pdf first gives you a nice snapshot of the master file and how it will look and in the event of a jam or mishap, it's much easier to restart printing at the right spot. Finally, doing also allows for last minute edits, such as rotating or deleting pages, etc.

Another alternative is to outsource the job to a printer or a bindery since they have professional equipment just for making all kinds of books. Then you can just cut a check and be done with it.

The covers are all different. All have different names printed on them, which corresponds to the data inside.

You have hit the nail on the head though. If a specialist company can do this, how can I?

I want THAT machine the specialist company has, whatever it is, as these are a 7 times yearly job. We need the proper equipment.

Shirley, you might be on to something there. Macro's might be a short term answer.

[saburnsjax]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Macro's might be a short term answer.

Not even macros...just 3 Fields inserted into the main document. The fields are interpreted when the mail merge occurs.

I do agree with kingpd though, I either print to the 'process and hold' feature of our printing equipment or I print to Adobe rather than directly to print.

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

Re: A5 booklets with covers - Can any machine do this properly? Please help!

Well there's a couple of other thoughts. I've seen people at a phone company before write software code for specialized print jobs. This would be a completely custom application but there are people that do it.

The equipment that handles these special applications are made by many companies and they can be streamlined with the office equipment or run separately. You'll still have to somehow get all the pages the right order before they can be finished.

The bindery machines aren't cheap either. Depending on what you get they can be around $10,000 up to hundreds of thousands...I'd check with some printing mags websites to look at what's out there:
American Printer
Printing Impressions
Quick Printer

Another cheaper route to go might be to get a "digital press." Canon, Konica Minolta, Oce, Ricoh, and Xerox are the ones that come to mind but I personally would go with the first two.

Anyone else out there can correct me on this but I was going to recommend either a Canon Imagerunner 7095 or Konica Minolta 1050 or whatever the latest version is for black and white. You should be able to set up the machines so that say the first and last page pull from a particular drawer that would have your cover stock and the middle gets printed on regular paper. The only thing is you'd need to have every set as a separate file if the number of pages differs for each booklet. These machines have different booklet finishing options. I don't remember if both have both options but there's saddle stitching and trimming and there's perfect binding.

The only other suggestion I can recommend is print the middle and covers separately with the interposer to put the cover on and do random accuracy checks to make sure they didn't get messed up.

I deal with mailing equipment so I know they have what's called OMR. I don't know if you can print it and have binding equipment read it. It's basically little ticks read by a scanner on a device that says keep pulling another sheet or this is the last sheet.