Imposition: repeat a finished design on a print sheet
A finished business card is one thing. A sheet of that card, spaced for printing and cutting, is another. Print Prepper’s Imposition step takes one finished page and repeats it at actual size on a sheet, with its own preview and downloadable PDF.
Do the artwork work first: crop, padding, any AI edits, then process the job and check the result. Imposition uses that finished print PDF. Your original print PDF and soft proof stay available, and arranging the sheet uses no AI credits.
Start with the finished page
Open Imposition on a ready job. If the job has several pages, use Finished page to repeat to choose the one you need. Every copy on the sheet will be that page.
This is useful for repeating a card, label or flyer. It does not combine different designs on one sheet, pair fronts with backs, or arrange booklet pages for folding. For two-sided work, the front/back alignment and duplex setup still need a separate workflow.
If you are starting with several customer files, combine and check those files first. Merging pages into a job and repeating a page on a sheet are separate steps.
Choose the sheet your printer will use
The default is SRA3, 320 × 450 mm. The other presets are A4, A3, A2, A1 and A0. Custom sheets accept dimensions from 50 to 1000 mm per side; use the A0 preset for its full 841 × 1189 mm size.
Choose the sheet orientation and artwork rotation, or leave them on Best fit. Best fit compares portrait and landscape sheets and, when allowed, a 90° turn of the artwork. It changes the arrangement, not the size of the design.
A 90 × 55 mm card stays 90 × 55 mm at trim. If no copies fit, the app asks you to use a larger sheet, reduce the margins or gutter, or allow rotation. It does not shrink the card to make it fit.
Leave room for bleed and the cutter
Three settings affect how many copies fit:
- Printable margin leaves space at all four sheet edges. Set it for the printer’s actual printable area, not just the paper size.
- Gutter adds space between the copies’ bleed areas. A 2 mm gutter means 2 mm between those areas, in addition to the bleed already around each design.
- Cutting guides can be included outside the grid or switched off. Including them reserves another 5 mm inside each printable margin.
The bleed comes from the finished PDF. Imposition keeps that bleed with each copy and spaces the copies so their bleed areas do not overlap. It does not create a different bleed width for the sheet. To change the artwork or its bleed, finish those changes in the job and process it again first.
Existing crop marks around the individual design are removed from the repeated artwork. If you include cutting guides, the sheet gets guides aligned to the trim edges outside the grid, rather than marks drawn across adjacent copies.
Preview, then download
Select Preview imposition. Check the chosen page, sheet dimensions, trim size, bleed, rotation and copies per sheet. The preview reports the rows and columns and the 100% scale.
Change a setting and preview again before downloading. The preview reflects the last submitted settings, not changes still sitting in the form. Then choose Download imposition PDF for the separate sheet file.
At print time, check the PDF’s paper size and use actual size or 100% in the print workflow. A printer driver’s “fit to page” setting can scale a correctly sized PDF. The app’s preview cannot check the driver, printable area or finishing setup for you.
After a design change
An Imposition link expires after 30 minutes and stops working if the design changes. A PDF already downloaded is a snapshot; it cannot update itself. Finish and process the revised design, then make a fresh imposition.
For an older job that asks you to process the design again, do that before creating the sheet. Imposition needs the current finished PDF’s trim and bleed information to separate the artwork from its original marks safely.