Using separation and imposition together

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

Automatic separation and imposition are two quite separate mechanisms.

Imposition takes several pages from a PostScript-language job and changes the behavior of the showpage operator so that instead of delivering a page, it changes the coordinate system for the next page.

Therefore, when showpage really does deliver a page, the display list contains the information for all of the imposed pages, just as if the marks came from one big page—there is one stencil representing the layout, not many.

Imposed pages can then, of course be separated. But from the stencil analogy, it should be clear that the pages cannot be positioned differently relative to each other in the different separations.

The following figure shows an example (the dark color represents one separation and the light color another):

Bad and good separations