: How to design an address book in adobe indesign? Someone asked me to design an address book for him in Indesign. I have no idea of how to do it to be ready for printing and cutting. Is

@Rivera951

I'm not 100% sure about any book die cutting. However, I have done hundreds of business card, decals, stickers etc. with die cutting inside Adobe Illustrator.

The first thing you should do is create a new swatch colour (Make sure it is a spot colour) and name it "CutContour" (used in Roland machines), "DIELINE" (a meaningfull name so other people can see what it is).

As far as I have seen, Pure magenta 100% lines are mostly used to represent die cuts, where 100% cyan (or dotted magenta) are used for folds (not needed in your project). However, you can use any colours you want.

Then all you have to do is to create a cut line, a contour line around your artwork where you want the tabs in your address book to be cut. Give it a stroke with the colour swatch you have just created and put it as the first Layer in your hierarchy.



I do not own this image, it was just first image from Google.

Please note: on different printers/plotters the spot colour for cutting will need to have different names. However, that is usually changed by the printers themselves to fit their machines.

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@Si6392903

You'll want to speak directly with the printer who is producing the book for you (or for your client). There's a chance they will have pre-made dies (the metal pieces they use to cut custom shapes from paper for projects like this, or say, a pocket folder). In this case, it seems more likely that they will need to make custom dies for this project, one for each groupings of letters.

You'll set up the document in InDesign as if the pages were going to be regular rectangles, but allowing extra space in the document size on the outside edges for the category lettering (the size of this extra space is up to you and/or printer).

Then, you'll create layers for the die, so the printer knows how to make them, and subsequently, where the paper will be cut. Here's how the first dieline (in red) would look. Notice the layer palette, as it's a good way to set up this document:



Then another layer for the 2nd dieline:



And so on.

You can set up Master Pages for each dieline if you want, but separate layers will work fine.

One other important note. To color the stroke for each dieline, make sure to use a SPOT color. This will allow the printer to print just that area of the document separately, which will allow them to make the custom die from it. (You can use the same color for every separate dieline, I just used different colors here to make it easier to see what was happening.)

Hope this helps! Again, work closely with your printer (and their pre-press department) to avoid issues and re-work. Always best to find out exactly what they need/expect before starting the project.

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