Printing Book Covers

We have a design meeting coming up, and since our design person just retired it fell to me to print the flashy new cover proposals. VERY cool printer, VERY big and intimidating if you've never used it, printing on VERY VERY expensive card stock!

= Low margin for error. *gulp*

Anyway, the printer paper is 24" x 12", large enough for several book covers to be printed off in a row. The design person used to manually copy and paste each cover into a massive Adobe Photoshop document, then work some Page Setup/Print magic and voila'! Multiple covers!

I'm not a Photoshop guy--more of an Acrobat person, myself. My solution, carefully selected after hours of wrangling with PS to follow my wishes as well as my commands, was more along the lines of:

1. Combine the PDFs into a single file in Acrobat.
2. Change the Page Setup to print 24x12.
3. At the Print dialogue, tell Acrobat to print multiple pages per sheet, namely 3x1.

Which worked fine...

EXCEPT that one of the covers was twice as large as the others (front AND back instead of just the front). Which meant that Acrobat wanted to squish it (to use the technical vocabulary) down to a normal 8.5x11 sheet like the others when printing three-across.

But I hated to throw out a good, time-efficient idea for one little reason like that.

Picture package was one option, but I'd already determined that it wouldn't work for other reasons. Same with its twin, Contact Sheet II. PS was out of the question, as I now have an eternal despising of copying and pasting various layers in that artist's dreamworld.

Final Answer: Duplicate the last page (i.e., merge the same file into the compiled PDF again). Use Acrobat's "Crop Page" option to crop one image down to the back cover (and spine), and the other down to the front cover.

Worked like a dream. :-)