Page Creep

In online printing, page creep is the gradual fanning out of pages that occurs when folded sheets are gathered and bound together. As you fold more pages together, the thickness of the paper pushes the inner pages farther outward. This causes the inner pages to extend beyond the outer pages, and the amount of creep depends on the total page count and paper thickness.

Once the pages are folded and bound together, the final trim will cut off the edges of the innermost pages. This trimming accounts for page creep and helps create an even finished edge.

You’ll likely encounter page creep on saddle stitch booklets. In custom booklets with up to 48 pages, the creep is often barely noticeable and doesn’t need to be accounted for. In booklets with more than 48 pages, compensating for the inevitable creep requires incrementally shifting the pages inward order to end up with a consistent outer margin.

To avoid booklet creep, you can print your project with a different binding. Spiral coil, wire coil and perfect bound books are all great alternatives because their pages are not folded inside one another, so you won’t have to account for creep.

How Can I Adjust for Page Creep?

The easiest way to account for page creep is to have your online printer’s prepress department make the necessary adjustments. However, if you’d like to do it yourself, you’ll need to know the thickness, or caliper, of the paper you will be printing on.

Once you have the caliper, follow these formulas to determine the creep of your pages:

• Number of spreads = (Number of pages ÷ 4) − 1
• Total creep = Number of spreads × Paper thickness (caliper)

For example, to determine the page creep on a 48-page book printing on 70# offset paper with a .005 caliper, the formulas would look like this:

• 48/4 = 12-1 =11 (11 is your number of spreads)
• 11 x .005″ = .055″ (.055″ is your total creep)

The reason the -1 is in there is because your first spread does not need to be adjusted for creep.

Adjusting for page creep manually on your own can be very time consuming, which is why it’s highly recommended to allow your online printing service’s prepress department to do it. Since most imposing software adjusts the files for creep as needed by simply entering the paper caliper, it takes them no time at all.

For most saddle stitch booklet projects, letting prepress handle page creep is the simplest way to ensure your pages are properly aligned and your finished booklet has consistent margins.

For questions about page creep or any other printing services, contact customer service and chat with our print experts.