Lay out the press sheet in your browser.
Booklets, N-up, step and repeat, gang sheets, tiled posters and numbered tickets — imposed by your own computer from a PDF you never have to upload.
Built the way a press room works.
A PDF goes in. A press sheet comes out — folded, ganged, numbered, marked up and ready for the RIP — without leaving your browser tab.
Built for the press sheet, not the screen
Booklet signatures with creep, N-up grids, step and repeat, cut and stack, gang sheets, dielines and tiled posters: layouts that exist because a press, a folder and a guillotine exist.
Your files stay on your machine
Every page is read, imposed and written back by your own browser. There is no upload step and no server that ever sees a customer’s job.
Nothing to install, nothing to license
Open a tab on Windows, macOS, Linux or a Chromebook. No plug-in, no dongle, no per-seat license, and no account needed to try it.
Marks the bindery can use
Crop, bleed, fold, collating, lay and registration marks, color bars and slug lines, placed in the margins where they belong so nothing prints on the piece next door.
Preflight before you commit paper
Low resolution, the wrong color space, missing bleed, unembedded fonts, hairlines and page counts that will not fold — flagged while the sheet is still on screen.
Numbers, names and codes from a spreadsheet
Serialized tickets, badges, coupons and labels from a CSV, a barcode or QR code on each record, and cut-and-stack ordering so the stacks come off the cutter in sequence.
One tool, most of the jobs on the board.
Each of these is a job as it arrives at the counter, and the tool that turns it into a sheet.
A 24-page program by Friday
Drop the pages in, choose saddle stitch, and the sheets come out with the signatures in order and creep worked in, ready to fold and staple.
Booklet impositionFive hundred numbered tickets
Load a CSV, place one ticket design, and get serialized sheets with a QR code on every stub and stacks that cut in sequence.
Variable dataA sheet of die-cut labels
Repeat one label to fill the sheet at exact gaps, then add the cut contour and registration the cutter wants.
Step and repeatBusiness cards, ten up
Set the card size and bleed, gang them onto 12 × 18 or SRA3, and send the sheet to the guillotine with its cut marks.
Card sheetsA perfect-bound catalog
Signatures with the spine allowance already worked out, for a squared-back binder rather than a stapler.
Perfect bindingA wall poster on an office printer
Tile a large-format file across Letter or A4 sheets with overlap and alignment marks, trim and tape.
Tiled postersFrom file to press sheet.
Imposition is the step between a finished document and a printable sheet: the pages are placed, turned and ordered so that after folding and cutting they read as intended. Here that step is a tab in your browser.
Open the file
Drag a PDF into the editor — or images, or a CSV if the job has numbers and names on it. It opens in your browser and stays there.
Pick the job
A saddle-stitched booklet, an N-up sheet, a step-and-repeat run, a tiled poster, a dieline. Set the sheet, bleed, gutters and marks; the preview redraws as you type.
Export the press sheet
Download a PDF laid out for your press and your finishing, page order and marks included. Open it in the RIP and print.
Pick the layout, not the software.
Ninety-odd tools in one editor, each one there because a real job needed it. The full catalog is in the footer and in the editor itself.
Notes from the shop floor.
Short, practical pieces on the parts of prepress that go wrong most often: folding, trimming, backing up and getting a file past the RIP.
Reading a folded dummy
Fold a blank sheet, number the pages, unfold it. The quickest way to see why an imposed sheet looks scrambled and where creep pushes the inner pages.
Bleed, trim and safe area in millimeters
How far to extend the art, how far to keep type back from the cut, and why 3 mm is the usual answer to both.
Gutters for a slitter versus a guillotine
A slitting cutter steps one constant pitch; a guillotine cuts wherever you set the back gauge. The sheet has to be built for the machine you own.
Choosing a signature size
Four, eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages per sheet, and what each choice costs in paper, folding time and binder capacity.
Duplex settings that do not flip your backs
Long-edge or short-edge, mirrored back sheets, and the one test sheet that settles it for good.
Getting a PDF ready for a RIP
Embedded fonts, CMYK with an output intent, hairlines, overprint, and the handful of checks worth running before a plate is made.
Your next sheet is one tab away.
Open the editor, drop the PDF in, and have a marked-up press sheet back before the kettle boils. No install, no upload, and nothing to sign up for to try it.
The things people ask before they open it
Straight answers, from how the editor actually behaves. Anything else, the contact page reaches a person.
Ninety-odd tools, one editor.
ImpositionPDF started as the in-house prepress tool of a small print shop and grew one job at a time: a booklet that would not fold right, a run of tickets that needed numbering, a sheet of cards for a cutter that steps a fixed pitch. Every tool in the catalog exists because a real job needed it. All of them run in the browser, on your own machine, on a PDF that never has to be uploaded.
Imposition & layout
What you can make
Marks, color & prepress
Page & PDF tools
What the desktop apps, plug-ins and prepress suites are good at, and where doing the job in a browser tab — on your own machine, nothing uploaded — differs.