Playbill format
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Printed Date: 5/10/25 at 9:27am
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Topic: Playbill format
Posted By: Guests
Subject: Playbill format
Date Posted: 3/07/03 at 12:36am
Am responsible for preparing the playbill for our show.
I can't get the pages to intersect correct. What is the trick????
I've tried creating a booklet format in WORD and WordPerfect. The pages never come out in the correct order.
HELP is appreciated.
Thanks.
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Replies:
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 3/07/03 at 12:04pm
Jesse,
How many pages are you talking about? Your playbill should be 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches, or a regular letter sized sheet folded in half, and there will be four pages on each sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. Therefore, the total pages on your playbill should be a multiple of four. 4, 8, 12, 16, etc. If you need fewer pages than one of these round numbers, you're going to have to leave some pages blank. Maximum blank pages will be 3. Anyway, take a number of blank sheets of paper, stack them and fold them in the middle. Now staple them, right in the fold. (The fold is called a gutter.) That's your booklet mock up. Turn it the right way and look at it as you would look at a finished playbill. Write the page number on each page. Dismantle your booklet. Look at each sheet. It marked with page numbers according to the way they should be oriented and printed in order to appear correctly when bound. Now set up your page on Word to print in landscape and make two columns. Each column will be one page of the playbill. If you had a four-page playbill, one page on your computer would be -- from left to right -- playbill pages 2 and 3, and the opposite side would be playbill pages 4 and 1. (Not 1 and 4!) I hope this makes sense.
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 3/07/03 at 12:56pm
Another option is to use a program like Microsoft Publisher which can automatically handle the printing of books folded in this way.
Dan
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Posted By: Chris Polo
Date Posted: 3/15/03 at 11:14am
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If you absolutely can't get your program to produce the pages 2-up (2 program pages on one letter-sized sheet) in the proper order, or the instructions you've gotten here are confusing, set up a letter-sized sheet in landscape and create two columns on it. The columns will each be one playbill page. Type up your pages in the order that you'd like to read them in, print them out, and cut them in half so you have individual 5.5"x8.5" program pages rather than 2 pages on a sheet. Then either glue them down on a letter-sized piece of carboard in the order that NicH suggested, or take the pages to your local quick printer, show them what you want to do, and ask them to show you how to lay it out. You can ask their advice even if you plan to eventually photocopy the program yourself -- they get questions like this all the time and are usually happy to help you. Get an estimate on the cost to let the printer do it instead while you're in there, and you may find that it's cheaper to let them do it.
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 3/30/03 at 3:06pm
Thanks for the suggestions. I took the easy way out.
For a 4-page program, I created 4 separate WORD documents (in landscape format). Each document had 2 columns (the text rolled over onto them).
I printed the documents, and designed a "mock program" by cutting (with scissors) and pasting the sections the way they would look in a final layout.
Going back to the WORD document I "cut and pasted" the sections in the approriate column of each document and printed the program.
Other suggestions from friends were to use WordPerfect as it is geared more toward "publishing layouts".
Jesse
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 4/04/03 at 8:17pm
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I agree with using Word Perfect - it is far better than MS word - easier to format a document the way you want rather than the way the program wants to format it. I have been able to make the pages come out easily in WP.
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