This is in contrast to, for example, a saddle stitch booklet, where there are two pages printed on each side of a sheet of paper. (This would be referred to as 2-up.)
Content that is outside the trim area, in order to support printing right to the edge of your final product.
Because printers are not perfectly precise, if you want to print right to the edge of a page, you make your content go beyond the edge, so that when the pages are cut down to size, there's no chance of tiny white borders on inaccurately cut edges. Bleed refers to the content that is cut off.
On a home printer, you might not be cutting pages down to size, but some home printers try their best to print right to the edge of the paper anyway. This is sometimes known as full bleed printing, or borderless printing — the terms are synonymous.
See Bleed for how Octavo handles bleed.
Small staggered rectangles printed on the spine of each signature. When the signatures are stacked in order, the marks form a diagonal staircase pattern — if one is out of place, it's immediately obvious.
Octavo can add collating marks automatically when using the Multi-Signature imposition style.
A method of binding documents using a plastic spine with curved teeth.
In Octavo, the Comb Binding imposition style can also be used for wire binding or hole punching.
Short lines printed in the corners of a sheet to show where to cut. Sometimes called trim marks.
If you're trimming your pages down to a finished size, these marks are your cutting guide. Octavo can add crop marks (and other marks such as fold marks and centre marks) in the Marks pane.
Printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. If your printer supports automatic duplex, it flips the paper itself. Otherwise, you print one side, flip the stack by hand, and feed it through again — this is manual duplex.
See Duplex for more detail on how Octavo handles double-sided printing.
Arranging the pages of your document into the right order and placement to turn them into e.g. a booklet.
To make booklets, you need to put the front cover and back cover, along with the second and penultimate pages, onto the same sheet of paper. And so forth, matching up pages towards the front and back of the booklet. The act of ordering and placing pages onto sheets is called imposition.
A folded and stapled booklet.
This is the most common way to print a booklet: each page uses half of one side of a sheet of paper, you fold everything down the middle, and staple the spine. Even though it's called 'stitch', it usually refers to stapling.
In Octavo, use the Saddle Stitch imposition style to make folded booklets, whether or not you plan to staple them.
In commercial printing, a signature is one large sheet of paper with lots of book pages on (for example, sixteen pages), that is folded and cut to produce a mini booklet, and then a number of these booklets are bound together to form the final book.
In Octavo, the Multi-Signature imposition style formats your document into multiple independent booklets. You can fold each one separately, then bind them together (perhaps by sewing them) to produce a larger work, thus avoiding having to fold too many pages together at once. Since Octavo is focussed on home/DIY printing, it doesn't yet support putting many pages of a booklet onto one huge sheet of paper.
A Spread refers to two facing pages (left and right) viewed simultaneously when a book, magazine, or brochure is open.
There are two more specific definitions:
A Reader's Spread is the spread of consecutive pages, as the reader would see them; e.g. pages 2 and 3 in a book.
A Printer's Spread is the pages positioned based on their imposition, or how they are printed. In a sixteen page booklet, this might be pages 2 and 15, for example.
In Octavo's Placement pane you can switch between the two types of spread using the Preview/Imposition control underneath the preview.
A sheet folded into three panels, producing a six-page leaflet (three on each side). There are two common ways to fold:
A C-fold (or letter fold) has one panel slightly narrower so it tucks inside the other two — this is how you'd fold a letter to put in an envelope.
A Z-fold (or accordion fold) has equal panels that zigzag back and forth.
In Octavo, you can choose either fold style in the Tri-Fold imposition settings.
Cutting the paper down to size after you've printed on it.
This is common in professional printing. It lets you get the exact size of final product that you want, and it facilitates using bleed to print right to the edge of the page. See Trimming for more detail.
A handmade booklet, fanzine or other magazine produced non-professionally for a relatively small audience.
Zines are art, or political statements, or part of a subculture, or whatever you want. The one common factor is they don't have commercial backing. If you're printing booklets yourself and giving them out or selling them, congratulations, you've made a zine.
Octavo has two imposition styles specifically for zines, 8-page Zine and Concertina Zine. Both of these are ways to make miniature zines out of a single sheet of paper. Got more to say than will fit in one of these? It's totally allowed to use the Saddle stitched booklet style to make zines too. There are no rules.