I’ve setup an 9UP cut and stack imposition preset, where I have set the stack depth to 100 sheets. The data set has 950 records, and Connect correctly calculated the imposition sequence.
However, the output file is only one and at sheet number 101 the cut and stack sequence resets as expected. How can I split the output file so that when the stack depth is reached a new file is produced?
The reasoning is that we are producing several sequences and we can’t have the production manually set the printers to print 1-100 and 101-end. We want to obtain separate files.
Thanks, this would work fine if no grouping is present indeed.
However in a more realistic and complex scenario it wouldn’t work, an example works best here:
200 records with a field CATEGORY which can have 2 different values A - B
Job creation preset has:
grouping active at the Document Set level on the CATEGORY field so there would be two logical groups
metadata is active to pass down to the output preset the CATEGORY value
Output preset has:
Imposition set to 2UP and stack depth of 10 sheets
Separation is set to Document set
File name is based on the CATEGORY metadata field
The observed output is:
2 PDF files A.pdf B.pdf with 50 sheets each, correctly separated and named after the CATEGORY field
The cut and stack sequence is “reset” every 10 sheets
The files are printed separately, but to proceed to the cut and stack of a file the operator has to manually split the 50 sheet stack of evert file every 10 sheets by counting the sheets by hand.
I’ve made the example with simple numbers but the real word scenario we had recently was 42 groups of 900+ records with a stack depth of 100. We couldn’t have the operator count 100 sheets manually to proceed to the cut and stack so we did again the process with InDesign + XMPIE module which can split the PDF file at the stack depth size.
The desired output we want to achieve is:
10 PDF files: A1.pdf A2.pdf… A5.pdf and B1.pdf… B5.pdf
Yeah, in a more complex situation like that, I’d expect to have to use the Workflow for part of this. The simplest option would likely be to have Connect do the imposition, grouping, and base separation by those logical groups, thus creating one file per group. Then have the Workflow pick each of those and separate them, either with a simple PDF splitter, or by passing it through a second Connect template that can do a second level of splitting.
One could conceivably use Filtering or Retrieve Items actions to break up the initial data. For example, the Datamapping and Template could run, then a looping Retrieve Items pulls subsets of those composed files based on a field value and passes only those records on to the final imposition step where the imposed file can then be split by sheet count.