: Best Practises - What shall we set as "our" A5 size? During my engineering training, several decades ago, we learnt that A4 is 297x210mm and accordingly A5 is 210x148,5mm. Today an intern showed
During my engineering training, several decades ago, we learnt that A4 is 297x210mm and accordingly A5 is 210x148,5mm.
Today an intern showed me a template she is making and I noticed that she had only created pages of 210x148mm. Turns out that Scribus had pre-sets called A5 with that size. My eyes did not like the "surplus" strip of 1mm when two pages are shown on one sheet-A4 (even on the screen it looks wrong to me).
Next I took my intern to Wikipedia and was surprised that indeed there is a mention in ISO 216 of "rounded to the nearest millimetre". So A5 is listed as 148x210mm.
Now our intern is preparing a series of 33 childrens' activities sheets which will be produced in four different ways:
initial drafts on folded A4-sheets from our office laser printer
folded A4 sheets, giving four pages A5 each, mass-printed b/w by offset for each child to have and work in
sets of A2 posters in full colour for the teachers on cardstock; one for each page, so the activities can be explained to the class
A5 PDF-Documents of four pages in colour for online distribution to kids/parents
As we are planning for mixed production from the same Scribus-file, including blow-ups to A2, and also want to take our documents to a professional print-shop, I do not want to mess up the page-size from the start.
This educational project is meant for West Africa and will take hundreds of hours of creating the activities and the layouts, so this is why I am asking for your help. Our budget is limited but we want to do proper files and respect norms.
What do other users do? Force Scribus or InDesign to a page width of 148,500mm when two pages are printed unto a sheet of A4 size? Or really set your DTP program to a page-width of 148mm and accept that two pages on an A4 sheet will end up further to one side? Is there a setting somewhere, where we can precisely place our A5 pages on the A4 paper-sheets (for example to allow generous space for the center-fold)?
Thank you.
Update: I have researched prizes at online print-shops and as an indirect benefit I looked over their specs or instructions: Seems that in real life (Germany) they prefer an A5 document in 148,0 x 210,0 mm (plus bleed, which is 3mm all round for the digital print-shop which will get our order).
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Honestly, there shouldn't be an issue. You should always have a bleed of more than .5 mm (if you need bleed), which you can use to compensate if you're upscaling or placing on a larger page. Print or cutting inaccuracies can drift by that much anyway (hence the bleed). If you don't have a bleed of that much then you're either not printing anything to the edge of the page or you're going to have problems anyway.
The "surplus" 1 mm you're seeing in Scribus sounds like a display issue in the program and it shouldn't export like that (if it does, that'd be a bug you should report — but I don't use Scribus so I have no idea).
As for printing on A4, either you will be printing with a bleed and the paper will be correctly trimmed or you're not printing to the edge and the pages can be centered on the A4. Half a mm difference on each side shouldn't be noticeable. If it really is an issue then add an extra .5 mm to your inside margins – but inaccuracies in the printing, trimming or even stock size can be more than that anyway.
As you've seen, the ISO standard is to round to the nearest mm and most templates do this so stick with that – no need to complicate things.
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