ImposeIQ Cover Builder guide

Quick start

A page-layout editor for one job: the cover of a perfect-bound book. It works like a small InDesign laid out for covers — the flat cover is drawn as back cover, spine and front cover with the folds, bleed, safe areas and hinge creases shown — and the spine width comes from the book itself rather than from a number someone typed in. ImposeIQ Book's cover panel still does quick covers; use Cover Builder when the cover needs real design work.

1. Load the body PDF on the Book tab. Its page count and trim size are read, and the spine is worked out.
2. Pick the paper — grade and basis weight, or type the mill's PPI or a measured caliper.
3. Design the cover — place the body's first and last pages, or draw text, image and shape frames yourself. Add spine text and the ISBN barcode from the tool bar.

The online edition runs in your browser: your files are never uploaded, and everything it saves is marked as a demo and downloaded.

Body PDF & spine width

The spine is pages ÷ PPI, plus a glue allowance if your binder needs one, plus twice the cover caliper if Add cover wrap is on. The pages come from the body PDF, less any pages that are really the cover (Pages in the PDF that are the cover) and plus any blanks you will add to finish a signature. An odd count is rounded up — a leaf is two pages.

Enter it switches to a spine width typed by hand. The spine is shown at the top of the canvas and on the Book tab, with exactly how it was worked out. Everything on the front cover is anchored to the front cover, so when the page count changes and the spine grows, the front art moves with the front panel instead of sliding into the spine.

Use the body's trim size sets the cover to the book's page size. The four Place body pages buttons put page 1 on the front, the last page on the back, page 2 inside the front and the second-to-last page inside the back, each with its trim box exactly on the panel's trim and its own bleed hanging off the outside edges.

Editing the cover

Dropping files on the canvas places them — onto an image frame if you drop on one, otherwise as a new frame fitted to the panel under the pointer. Snap catches trim, bleed, folds, hinges, safe areas, panel centres and other objects. The Layers list shows / hides and locks each item; Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[ move it up and down. Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y) cover every change. With nothing selected, Properties sets a background colour for the whole spread or for one panel; panel colours stop at the folds and run into the bleed on the outside edges.

Colours are written to the PDF as CMYK when the CMYK box is ticked (the default for the swatches: 100K, rich black 60/40/40/100, process colours) and as RGB otherwise. Preflight warns above 320% total ink.

Inside covers, flaps & glue

+ Page adds another outside or inside spread, or duplicates the current one — handy for a second version or a dust jacket. The inside spread is the outside turned over, so it runs inside front · spine · inside back. Untick a page to leave it out of the PDF; an inside page with nothing on it is left out automatically if Output says so.

French flaps add a flap panel at each end with its own fold. Right binding edge swaps the front and back for books that read right to left.

On the inside cover the spine and a strip past each spine fold are kept white — ink there stops the binder's glue taking. The strip is hatched on screen; set its width under Cover stock & creasing, or turn it off. The strain-relief (hinge) creases are shown as green dotted lines, and Export DC crease XML writes the same DC jobs ImposeIQ Book does — one per pass, fed with the spine square to the feed.

DC / OMR marks

Under Output, DC / OMR marks prints the Duplo DC registration marks and job barcode on the cover sheet — REG mark, skew and shrink marks (DC-648 only), the Code 39 barcode with optional text, and a QR code — with the same sizes and positions as Book's OMR Marks. Only the marks a machine ticked in Settings → Machines can read are offered.

• Needs a press sheet. Set PDF page size to Centred on a press sheet. The DC finds the marks from the real sheet edge, so the PDF page has to be the sheet that is fed.
• Top-left of the page. A cover goes into the DC spine-first, square to the feed, so the page's left edge leads. The marks sit on the lead corner: the top-left of the PDF page.
• Two-pass covers. With no up-crease module, fold + strain relief runs twice. The second run is the sheet flipped over, inside face up, so the inside page carries the pass-2 marks with the next barcode number. That page prints even if it has nothing else on it.
• The DC job matches. With marks on, Export DC crease XML describes the press sheet, where the cover sits on it, and the same mark and barcode positions. The crease positions do not change.
• Checks. Preflight flags marks that would print over the cover's bleed or fall off the sheet. Use a bigger sheet or change Marks top / Right. The marks go on their own switchable PDF layer, “ImposeIQ OMR Marks”, unless you untick it.

DDC and UD-320. The same card also prints DDC marks (DDC-8000 / DDC-810 PRO) and UD-320 register marks, placed as in Book, in the same spine-first feed as the DC marks:

• DDC: circles down both side edges of the outside face. You set the margin, spacing and diameter. The first row starts 25 mm from the lead edge when the DC corner marks are on. Rows move off the shrink mark and anything else in the way.
• UD-320: the 100 mm Y bar at the lead edge, plus in X + Y mode the X mark. It goes 100 mm from centre on the outside and 76 mm on the inside, on the other side of the sheet, so both faces carry marks and the inside page always prints.

Preflight warns if the UD-320 X mark lands on a DC mark. When that happens, move the X mark to the other side of centre.

Folding the panels. Click the heading of any card in the right-hand panels — or a small heading inside one, or Pages or Layers on the left — to fold it away, and again to open it. Collapse all and Expand all are at the top of the right-hand panel. What you fold is remembered, including the cards in Properties, which are folded again each time you select something.

Templates

Templates… in the top bar keeps a cover for next time. A template holds the cover’s trim size, bleed and safe areas, binding, stocks, creasing, flaps, output and marks, and every frame on every page — text, shapes, barcodes, pictures and the fonts they use. It does not hold the body PDF. Open a template after loading the body, and the body stays: the spine is worked out for that book, not the one the template was made from.

• Save as template — give it a name. Tick Include the pictures and fonts to carry them; up to about 2.5 MB goes with the template, and a picture that does not fit is left out while its frame stays, empty, ready for the next picture. You are told what was left out.
• Open replaces the cover on screen (it asks first if there is anything on it). Update replaces a template with the cover now on screen. Delete removes it.
• Export… writes an .iqcovertemplate file to move a template to another PC; Import it there, or drop the file on the window. A template is kept on the PC it was saved on, so export the ones you cannot lose.
• Ready-made covers — four starting points built from the same panel geometry as the editor, so they sit right at any trim: a navy trade paperback, a cream digest novel, a full-bleed picture front, and plain white. Each has the title, subtitle, author, spine text, back-cover copy and an ISBN barcode in place, to type over.

A template is not the same as Save defaults, which keeps only the settings (never the artwork) for every new cover, nor the same as Save…, which keeps one finished cover, body PDF and all.

Settings and defaults

More → Settings… shows what new covers start from. Save defaults keeps this cover's:

• trim size, bleed and safe areas, and binding
• stocks, creasing and binder, and flaps
• output and press sheet
• OMR / DC / DDC / UD-320 marks
• units, guides, snap and press sheet view

Artwork and text are never part of the defaults. After saving, New starts every cover from the defaults. Apply defaults to this cover puts them onto the open cover without touching its artwork. Reset to factory defaults forgets them. With no saved defaults, a new cover starts from the last one you worked on.

See it on the sheet. Tick Press sheet in the bar under the canvas, or press S. The view zooms out to the whole press sheet with the cover where it prints, and draws the crop and fold marks, the slug and the DC / OMR marks for the side you are on (outside = pass 1, inside = pass 2 on a two-pass cover). A caption shows the sheet size, the pass and the barcode number, and the lead edge is labelled. Pick the sheet size from the list next to it. Turning the view on also sets Output to Centred on a press sheet, so the sheet you see is the sheet that prints. You can keep designing in this view. A red outline means the cover does not fit the sheet.

Confirm the reading positions on the machine with a test sheet before a live job, as with any new mark layout.

ISBN barcodes

Type the ISBN-13 with the hyphens your ISBN agency issued, e.g. 978-1-4028-9462-6 — the check digit is verified and the line above the bars is printed exactly as typed. An old 10-digit ISBN is converted. The five-digit add-on is the price: 51995 is $19.95 US, 90000 means no price. EAN-13, UPC-A, QR and Code 128 are there too. Keep the bars 100% black on white; the size is shown as a percentage of nominal, and retail scanners want 80–200%.

Preflight & export

The Preflight tab lists, per page: text or barcodes outside the safe area or crossing a fold, text that does not fit its frame or is under 5 pt, images under 250 ppi (warning) or 150 ppi (problem), spine text on a spine under 0.25 in, barcodes under 80%, heavy ink, an empty front cover, and a cover that does not fit the chosen press sheet. Click an item to jump to it.

Return to Cover Builder · Open the online demo · Downloads · Support