
Understanding Pages, Sheets and Layout
There are several aspects to the way PDFClerk imposes pages onto a sheet of paper that interrelate to produce the final output. Although PDFClerk hides much of the complexity from you by providing useful default behaviour, a good understanding of the main concepts explained in this section forms the basis to successful use of its more advanced capabilities.
Pages versus Sheets
The first step in understanding PDFClerk is to know the difference between PDFClerk's concept of pages and sheets and how they relate to each other:
Pages:
A PDFClerk document is basically a collection of pages. The pages are kept in a list that is shown on the left side of the PDFClerk document. They are created in one of four ways:
- Opening files:
You can open different types of files: PDF documents, PDFClerk documents, text documents and graphics files. Opening a PDF document creates a new PDFClerk document and imports all its pages. Opening a graphics file creates a new PDFClerk document with a single page consisting of the graphic. Opening a text file creates a new PDFClerk document with as many pages as are needed to hold the text contained in the source file.
- Importing files into open PDFClerk documents:
The files' contents will be inserted immediately before the currently selected page in the list (or the last page added to a selection if multiple pages are selected), or appended after the last page if no page is selected.
- Inserting files by dragging them onto the page list:
You can drag any type of file or folder onto the list. PDFClerk will parse the file or folder and import any contents it can handle. This includes graphics files, plain and rich text files as well as MS Word documents, PDF documents and other PDFClerk documents. These files will be inserted into the list at the location where you drop them, moving existing pages as appropriate.
- Creating blank pages:
Using the contextual menu available by right-clicking or control-clicking on the page list you can insert a blank page before the currently selected page in the list or append a blank page at the end.
Each page has an independent size. When viewing the PDFClerk document in non imposed mode each page is shown exactly according to its size. There are settings that allow control over how pages are sized. By default page size remains fixed at its original size after a page is imported, but you can specify a custom size (and align the source within that size). If the fixed size is smaller than the source the source's contents will be clipped, unless you scale the contents. (See Document Settings for more information.)
Sheets:
PDFClerk uses the concept of sheets of paper. When you activate an imposition, the source pages are imposed onto sheets of paper according to the rules defined in the template for that imposition (see Impositions & Templates and the Impositions Editor). Each sheet has two sides and each side is divided into a number of slots by rows and columns. Slot size can be dynamically calculated by PDFClerk, fitting the slots within the document's sheet margins, or it can be set manually, when you design or edit an imposition. Even and/or odd rows and columns can be flipped upside down and the margins for the sheets can be set for the document (individually for even/odd numbered sheets). The template settings together with the document settings determine the layout, and therefore the appearance the sheets.
As pages are distributed among the slots they are (by default) automatically proportionately scaled to best fill their slot.
Slots are distributed over the sheet evenly to fill up the space between the margins (the printable area). Depending on the size of the slots vs the size of the sheet this may create gaps between some slots. If this is undesirable make sure to match the size of the paper in Page Setup to the layout of the imposition. By manually specifying the size of the slots of an imposition you have total control over the final result.