Hi,
How can I use grouping, separation and imposition together?
If I print with these settings I get the following error:
These are my settings:
Hi Koen,
For me it looks like somewhere in the records there is something wrong with the value for ‘cadeau’. Did you try to make a simple output preset where you use the default settings and this Job Output Mask? Does this generate the same error?
Regards,
Eline
Hi Eline,
when I generate without imposition it’s working.
I get splitted pdf’s based on the variable cadeau.
If you print it out with a non metadata based name, you’ll begin to get a picture of what’s happening here.
First, the grouping occurs, then the imposition, and finally the separation is attempted. But by this time you’ve got records from multiple groups printed on a single sheet of paper.
I’ll take a simplified example where we want to group and split on Country. There are only two countries represented in our data set; US and CA.
Let’s say I’m also only doing a 1x2 imposition. So two pages per sheet.
With a cut and stack imposition all of the CA pages are grouped up and begin printing down the stack (left hand side, top to bottom). I eventually run out of CA pages part way down that stack and end up in US records for the rest of the stack. Likewise, stack two will be composed entirely of US records. What this means is that for the first couple of sheets I have mixed US and CA records on each sheet. This is normal for a cut and stack setup since the intention is that the sheet is physically cut and stack one is placed on top of stack two. The end result after physically performing the cut and stack is that you have all of the CA on top and all of the US on the bottom.
Now throw separation into the mix. It only happens after this imposition takes place. But we’ve got mixed records per sheet. How can we then handle the separation? The short answer is that we don’t. Separation gets ignored and you end up with a single output file. And without Set level separation, you also can’t use Set level metadata in the filename. Hence the error you’re seeing.
If we want this to result in one file for US and one file for CA, then we’re going to need to use filtering.
In our country based example, I’d need one preset that is filtered to deal with CA and a different preset filtered on US. We then move the separation up to the Segment level as well as the metadata. Finally we run the job through first one Job preset to filter only the CA records and another Job preset to filter only the US records. The end result will be two imposed files, grouped by state, and named accordingly.
Printing this from Design may be a little cumbersome, but if the job is destined for automation through the Workflow, this becomes a fairly simple job.
First, we execute the data mapper
Next, we create the print content
After this, rather than simply going straight into the normal Job and Output steps, we branch off like so.
Ignore the actual presets defined there for a moment. Each branch would essentially be handling one of the filters. In my simple example, two branches is sufficient and maybe we don’t need to get any more complex than this.
However, if you’ve got more than two, you’re probably going to want to look at a looping structure that dynamically calls the appropriate filter.
That then might look something like this:
So after the branch, we pick up some secondary file (perhaps created automatically earlier on) that contains a list of all of the countries represented in the data set. We then use an emulated data splitter to split this file on each country, read that country into a variable, and then use that variable to call the appropriate Job Preset.
thank you for your explanation.
I found out that the way I created my design this won’t work because I also need to print duplex.
front and back has different background based on input, which is created on different sections.
My solution is to sort the file and create one output. the imposition will happen on the printer (fiery workstation)