Print and Prepress Modes

Print mode

Asciidoctor PDF provides the following behaviors to assist with printing:

  • Shows the URLs for links unless the link text matches the URL

  • Consolidates page ranges in the index

  • Deactivates the links from page numbers in the index to the locations of terms in the document

To enable these printing features, set the media document attribute to print in the header of your AsciiDoc document or from the API or CLI (e.g., -a media=print). You may also want to consider using the print-optimized theme, which uses darker, grayscale colors for text and borders (e.g., --theme default-for-print).

Prepress mode

In addition to the print mode, Asciidoctor PDF provides the following behaviors to assist with publishing:

  • Double-sided (mirror) page margins

  • Automatic facing pages

Set the media attribute to prepress in the header of your AsciiDoc document or from the API or CLI (e.g., -a media=prepress) to activate the publishing features. The following sections describe the behaviors that this setting activates. You may also want to consider using the print-optimized theme, which uses darker, grayscale colors for text and borders (e.g., --theme default-for-print).

Double-sided page margins

The page margins for the recto (right-hand, odd-numbered) and verso (left-hand, even-numbered) pages are automatically calculated by replacing the side page margins with the values of the page-margin-inner and page-margin-outer keys.

For example, let’s assume you’ve defined the following settings in your theme:

page:
  margin: [0.5in, 0.67in, 0.67in, 0.67in]
  margin-inner: 0.75in
  margin-outer: 0.59in

The page margins for the recto and verso pages will be resolved as follows:

recto page margin

[0.5in, 0.59in, 0.67in, 0.75in]

verso page margin

[0.5in, 0.75in, 0.67in, 0.59in]

The page margins alternate between recto and verso. The first page in the document (after the front cover) is a recto page.

The recto margin is applied to the title page if a front cover is specified. To apply the recto margin to the title page without specifying a front cover, assign the value ~ to the front-cover-image.

Automatic facing pages

When converting the book doctype using the prepress media setting, a blank page will be inserted when necessary to ensure the following elements start on a recto page:

  • Title page

  • Table of contents

  • First page of body

  • Parts and chapters

Other “facing” pages may be added in the future.

It’s possible to disable the automatic facing feature for a given part or chapter. This can be done by applying the nonfacing option to a section. When the nonfacing option is present, the part or chapter title will be placed on the next adjacent page rather than the next facing page.

[%nonfacing]
= Minor Chapter

content