Hello everyone,

I am trying to do the following:

Produce certain quantaties of the same saddle stitched booklet according to a database (CSV) that is built as follows:

Class Students

A1 18
A2 22

B1 19
B2 24
.
.
.

The booklet (school news paper) might be an eight or twelve page document depending on the months issue.
Ideally I would like to utalize the subset finishing function.

So far I have come up with this:

Single page layout (A4) with a bit of static text and the variables for Class and student count.
"This stack of papers is for Class A1 with 18 students."

This page is followed by three blank layouts to give me a four page layout. The job ticket information described above will be printed on the first page and the other three pages will be blank therefore.

I then drag n' drop the according PDF (for example an eight page A4 document) onto the fifth blank layout, this now populates layouts five to twelve.

I have the "VAL" condition on the layout associated with the "Students" column to get the right amount of repetitions according to the class.

The problem I have identified so far is that using the "VAL" function will not send the 18 papers as single jobs but as one single job which in return disables the subset finishing for each single set. Not sure if my observation is correct but it seems to be the issue in my eyes.

Secondly the job ticket (the first spread containing the information for which class the paper is and how many issues are going to follow until the next "record" starts) needs to be treated like an exception. That one "cover sheet with job ticket information" will be saddle stitched together with the first booklet and can just be torn off.
I have tried to use the seperate by page count function in the driver and that of course gives me issues because only the very first booklet per record will be a 12 pager and the following 17 (in this example of class A1) will be only 8 pages. All the page layout gets tangled up therefore.

The overal goal is turning an A4 PDF document into saddle stitched booklets where the quantaty is determined by the student count per class. The different classes should be seperated by a job ticket that might be saddle stitched to the first copy of a set and is then torn off.

I am trying to achieve this workflow using various RICOH printers with Fierys (E-5200/E-7200/EB1357EX)

Any help or hint in the right direction would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

VDP

Hi VDP,

An option that would very likely work fine with your setup is the "embed PostScript" option. You have a preset available with the software that will perform subset finishing on a Fiery. You would select the option to embed "between sets", and select the option for Subset finishing on the fiery.

That should allow the finishing to occur between every record when sent as one big job.

Hope this helps. Regards,

Olivier

Hi Oliver,

Thanks for your reply.
I will have a go at the "embed postscript". I had tried a couple of things around that topic to no avail unfortunately.
Also I was not quite sure what I would want to set up in the page setup. There is optimized ps, Fiery Freeform and Fiery Freeform2. Which one of those options would I want to choose and why?
I'm also not to sure how PSM processes several repetitions of the same job using the VAL command. As the database is not structured as single records would PSM actually see the repetitions as single records and then be able to do subset finishing?

I'm happy to upload the PSM file I have come up with if that helps.

Thanks in advance!
VDP

Hi VDP,

At this stage I would open a support ticket. I am not certain I understand your setup, and unfortunately we cannot upload files on the newsgroups, so please feel free to open a support ticket to get proper assistance with your issue.

Regards,
Olivier