Understanding printing terminology can be difficult, especially when you’re just starting out. One of the most commonly misunderstood terms is collate. When you understand what it means and how it works, you’ll have much more control over the print process, making you feel confident about your print decisions going forward. Read on to find out more about collate in printing!
What is Collating?
A mechanical process that prepares printed materials for binding and printing. Collating ensures that all pages are in their proper sequence and are accounted for before being stitched into books or magazines. Without collation, errors could occur, such as leaving out an entire section of content.
For example,
If you want to print 100 copies of your book but accidentally skip page 50 during collation, then your book will be missing page 50! This can be very costly when it comes to mass-printing projects. However, there are many different types of collating processes depending on what type of job you’re working on.
In most cases, a machine will do most of the work for you—but it’s still important to know how it works so you can troubleshoot any issues that arise.
How to Collate when Printing:
The first and most important thing to understand about collating is that it refers only to printing. For example, if you are working on a project that involves multiple pages being printed out, say 10 pages. Then you need to make sure they are all lined up correctly on each page.
If there was no order or care taken in how these documents were printed and your results would have each of those 10 pages running from 1 through 10 but with different gaps between each of them.
This could lead to some confusion for whomever had to read over them or work with those files later on.
When to Collate Your Document
Before binding your document, you’ll want to collate it. This means placing your print job into proper order so that when it goes to be printed. It will print correctly and efficiently.
Most of us are pretty familiar with how to collate our documents; you simply take each page and stack them, making sure that each copy has an identical number of pages (when applicable).
For example,
If your document had three pages, you would make sure all three copies have three pages. The way we hold each copy together will vary depending on what kind of binding you chose for your project.
When to Leave Your Document Un-Collated
As your document begins to come together, you might find that you’re out of room on certain pages. If you’re working with professionally printed materials or if your document will be copied by a professional printing services, leave those pages un-collated.
The reason for doing so is that when each page has to be collated by hand after being copied. It creates extra work and means more wear and tear on your documents over time. If you need to fill out multiple copies of a document—
For example,
If you want to leave one copy at home and another copy at work—then leaving those pages un-collated makes sense because there’s no way to automate them during production.