Getting Started with Octavo

Welcome to Octavo, a Mac app for PDF cleanup, placement, imposition and printing.

Imposition is the term for arranging the pages of your document into the right order and placement to print and fold them them into e.g. a booklet. (See the glossary for more definitions.) Octavo can do much more than booklets: you can also make mini zines, brochures, business cards, and more.

Octavo’s document window shows the thumbnails of the pages in your source document across the top in the page strip. You can drag PDFs or images into here to import them, and drag pages around to re-order. Underneath that, in the left sidebar, are a series of workflow steps to go through:

Source Page

Clean up your imported PDF. If you've got a nice digital PDF, you might just use this section to adjust the margins to show which bit of the PDF you're importing. But if you've got a scan, you can use this section to rotate or de-skew, flip, or apply filters to clean up messy images.

Imposition Type

Tell Octavo what you want to make, and configure its options. For instance for a saddle stitched booklet (i.e. a regular folded booklet) has options for trim (for if you're going to cut the paper down to size), and spine edge (i.e. which side the booklet opens). Other imposition types have their own specific options.

Media

Here you configure the size and type of paper you're going to print onto. If you tell Octavo which printer you'll be using on this screen, it can show you how close to the edge of the paper you can print.

You can define more than one media type if you want, and then apply them to certain pages, for example if you want to use some coloured paper for the cover of your booklet.

Placement

Tell Octavo where on the page to position your source PDF, along with whether to scale things (automatically or manually).

Marks

If you're going to be trimming the paper, you can add marks to show you where to cut. There are a variety of possible marks; fold marks unsurprisingly show you where to fold, staple marks for where to staple, etc.

Page Numbers

Octavo can add, position, and style page numbers for you.

Print

The final step: send your document to a printer. Or you can export to PDF, we're not fussy!

If you have used more than one type of media, you can print each one as a separate job if you want.

Octavo tries to be helpful configuring your printer's settings for things like duplex printing, paper size, scaling and the like, to match your document's imposition settings.

What’s in the paid “Unlock Octavo”?

Octavo is a paid product, unlocked by a one-off in-app purchase. (No subscriptions here!)

Without paying, you can:

• Make mini zines (8 page zine or concertina zine) completely for free
• Try out any of Octavo’s features, including all the other imposition styles, but there’ll be a banner printed across the bottom of each page.

This demo version is designed to let you try out the software and see if it suits your needs, before committing to purchase it. (Or, if you just want to make zines, no need to purchase at all!)

For more information see the licensing help page.