Keith - I recently learned a new word. The word is "imposition," as in "Windows imposition software." So what is imposition software? I wasn't able to find a definition, but as far as I can tell, imposition software is software that allows you to print in formats that your printer probably does not already handle (e.g., booklets or newsletters)--at least, not with a lot of messy manual intervention. I assume that the reason for the name is that the software "imposes" itself between your application and your printer.

One of the best consumer applications in this category is FinePrint. Not only does FinePrint easily print booklets, but it can save you significant amounts of money by printing anywhere from 2 to 8 application pages on a single sheet of paper (known as 2-up, 8-up, and so forth), and also printing on both sides of the paper. Laser and inkjet printers can go through paper and ink very rapidly, and anything that can reduce the amount of paper and ink used will save you money. An additional benefit of printing multiple pages on a sheet is that you can greatly reduce the size of a large document, making it much more portable, manageable, and even easier to staple.

Many categories of software are bloated with numerous competitors trying to capture shares of the same market. However, FinePrint appears to have found a niche position without a lot of competition. While there are more expensive commercial imposition products, I was able to find only one other consumer application that is a significant competitor. More on it later.

FinePrint receives high ratings from its users. At CNET, the favorable rating is 94%, and at ZDNet the score is a clear 4 stars out of 5 in every category. It elicits comments such as "Best shareware I've ever used," "The best I ever had," "Coolest shareware I have ever downloaded," and "I LOVE THIS THING!!!!!"

Despite vast flexibility, FinePrint is easy to use. You don't have to use its advanced features until you're comfortable with them. It sets itself up as a "virtual printer" based on your physical printer. You can make it your default printer, or you can select it from the printer dropdown list at print time. You can then click Print to print immediately, or you can click on the Properties button, at which point a dialog box with several tabs opens, allowing you to select a layout and various other settings that will affect the way the document prints. You can also change the settings of your physical printer here. If FinePrint is your default printer, you can easily bypass it and print directly to your printer any time you so desire.

Going beyond the basic functionality, FinePrint exhibits a variety of nice little unexpected touches that make it a pleasure to use. You can defer a print job while you collect a variety of documents from a variety of sources or applications, then print them together. Once you have the documents you want to print, you can preview the print job, shuffle documents and pages, delete pages or insert blank ones, and print only when you have things exactly the way you want them. (The deletion feature allows you to delete that page with just the last two lines from the Web page that contain no useful information.) If you're planning a vacation, you can create a booklet containing all your flight information, hotels, and activities in one place by using this "defer" feature.

There may be little quirks to deal with. For example, when I printed double-sided pages on my HP 970, I found that the back pages were all upside down. However, information in the help file pointed me to a couple of checkboxes in the settings that fixed the problem.

FinePrint solves problems that have been a constant source of irritation for me. For example, I'm tired of printing Web pages (even pages from major sites) and losing a word or two at the end of every line. Whether printing one, two, or more Web pages on a sheet, FinePrint does not usually have this problem. It scales the pages as necessary to fit. (Sometimes it does take some work. I did have one instance of the right edge being cut off on the two sides of a 2-up; I was able to solve the problem by selecting a larger page size in Internet Explorer before printing.)

I print a lot of color documents in black and white to save colored ink. FinePrint allows me to set up one FinePrinter with my black and white settings and other with colored settings, so that all I have to do is choose the "printer" I want from the list and print, without having to click down through to the settings I want to change. You could set up one virtual printer for booklets, another for 2-up printing, up for 4-up printing, and so forth.

FinePrint even allows you to suppress the printing of any bitmaps on the page to save you even more ink.

Other features include the ability to mark documents with watermarks, headers, and footers, and to create and use forms and letterheads. You can print to the clipboard as well as to paper. Your last few jobs are automatically saved, so that you can reprint them without having to recreate them, and you can save a job permanently for future printing, if you so desire.

The program appears to be stable, has little impact on the system, and support is reported to be exceptional. (I did have my first program hangs tonight in XP while writing this review; it's very possible that there was a software conflict or a system configuration problem.)

I mentioned earlier that I had found one competing program. The name of the program is ClickBook. ClickBook, like FinePrint, allows you to print multiple pages on a single sheet and to print booklets. In addition, it includes over 60 preset layouts which you can select to print everything from recipes to door hangers to business cards to CD covers. If your main goal is to print in a wide variety of formats, ClickBook might be a good choice for you.

However, if your main goal is to save bulk and money, this is where FinePrint excels. For example, ClickBook lacks the ability to suppress bitmap printing. In addition, ClickBook currently lacks a preview mode in Windows 2000 and XP. (The preview mode does work in versions of Windows based on Windows 95.) The lack of a preview mode makes it difficult to get exactly what you want in a print job. Blue Squirrel, the manufacturer, says this capability will be coming; there may or may not be a charge to upgrade to the new version. ClickBook also costs $10 more than FinePrint.

George -

Overview

FinePrint 2000 adds valuable capabilities to Windows printing, acting as an intermediary between any application with a print function, and a Windows-compatible printer. It enables the multiple-pages per sheet of paper, batch printing, saved print jobs, and printing on stationery and forms. Excellent flexibility is provided, both through the variety of settings within a FinePrinter, and throughout the capacity to create many FinePrinters. Despite some observed shortcomings, primarily with batch printing, I give FinePrint 2000 an Excellent rating.

Installation

FinePrint installed quickly and easily. The license permits multi-computer installations for single users, or single-computer installations for multiple users. The company, FinePrint software, calls the software "a Windows printer driver that provides advanced printing capability," and it does, when installed, look like just another Windows printer.

I was pleased to see that the installer puts FinePrint's data folders into My Documents, consistent with Fine Print's multi-user claim. A different location can be specified in the configuration settings.

Skeptic that I am, I rejected the installer's suggestion to make FinePrint my default printer. An hour later, I changed my mind.

Terminology

Some definition of FinePrint's terminology might be helpful. "Document" means whatever you are printing; text, pictures, web pages, etc. "Page" refers to a document page, as determined in your application. A "sheet" is a piece of paper. A "job" is a document in the FinePrint output queue. A "FinePrint file" is a saved queue.. A "FinePrinter" is an instance of FinePrint.

Although FinePrint calls a document in its queue a job, which takes me back to mainframe days, I'll use the word "document" throughout this review, for the purpose of clarity.

Operation

FinePrint is really an intermediary between any Windows application with a print function, and a printer. To print a document, you use the normal print function in the application you are using, choosing FinePrint 2000 as the target printer. The FinePrint dialog pops up, showing a preview of the printed document, and six tabbed sections: Layout, Jobs, Settings, Stationary, FormFactory, and About. After you've selected how you want the final document to look, you can, with a button click, print the document and close the dialog, print and leave the dialog open, defer printing until later, or leave it open and add more documents. You can also cancel the print.

Printer Configuration

You can set FinePrint up, manually or with a wizard, for any and all printers you have installed on your system. The wizard prints test pages to characterize the printer, and set duplex printing options. FinePrint remembers the settings for each printer you set up, so you can change destination printers on the fly, by drop-down list selection. . The program provides excellent flexibility, by allowing the user to create as many FinePrinters as desired. More about that later.

Print Preview

The Layout tab of the FinePrint dialog displays a preview of the printed output, complete with all modifications applied within FinePrint. Right-clicking on the preview pops up a menu to zoom the preview window; to delete pages, documents, or sheets; to insert blank pages; and to print an individual sheet or copy it to the clipboard.

Navigation through the sheets is by a mouse wheel-compatible, vertical scroll-bar. I missed having "next," "previous," "first," and "last" buttons, and "go to sheet #" available, too.

There are two ways to selectively print sheets. One is the right-click, single sheet method. The other is to delete all of the sheets you don't want to print. FinePrint should provide a way to print selected sheets, as a group, without deleting sheets.

Sheet Layout

FinePrint will print 1, 2, 4, or 8 document pages on a single sheet. It can also print 2-sided booklets, or fill a sheet with multiple images of a page. A "Repeat" setting fills each printed sheet with 1, 2, 4, or 8 images of each page in your document. A "Bypass" setting sends the document to the printer without modification. Options include borders around pages, smart borders to separate documents, and a choice of how 4-up and 8-up pages are ordered on a sheet. Right to left printing is also available, for multi-lingual compatibility.

Having multiple pages on a sheet isn't very useful, if you can't read the text. FinePrint allows you to print your document without page margins. The text is then enlarged to fit the available space. You can also choose preset small, medium, or large margins, or use the documents original margins, and add a gutter to the long or short side of the sheet. For 8-up printing, document text sized 14pt or larger is recommended.

Batch Printing

This feature, in my opinion, is every bit as valuable as FinePrint's multiple-page per sheet capability. I do most of my work on a laptop, far from printers and network connections. I create a document, and save it. When I get to my printer, I retrieve the document and print it. That's not too bad, unless I have more than one document to print, filed in different folders for different projects. Then, the procedure is tedious.

FinePrint allows multiple documents to be queued for printing, so I can create a document and print it to FinePrint, which puts it in its queue, with options to run the documents together, or to start each document on a new sheet or new side of a sheet. When I'm ready to produce hard copy, I just send the queue to the printer, and relax.

It is not possible to apply different FinePrint settings to each document in a cue. If one document is 2-up, with wide margins, they all are. To work around that, queues with different settings can be saved as FinePrint files, for later printing. Even more conveniently, multiple FinePrinters can be created, each with its own set of options.

I have a small complaint. When the dialog is open, but behind other windows, and a document is sent to it, there is no visual cue that FinePrint received the document. I would like to see a one-second pop up, or a twinkling taskbar icon, perhaps.

FinePrinters

Click a button under the Settings tab, type in a name, and you've created a new FinePrinter. Any combination of printers and options is possible. Let's say you have a color printer, and a laser printer.

You might set up a FinePrinter called Color8 that will send 8-up sheets, with no separation between documents, to your color printer. Another FinePrinter could be set up to print onto your letterhead, to the laser printer. (See the limitations under "Stationery and Forms.")

Any FinePrinter can be set to display its dialog when a document is printed, or to remain invisible.

Stationery and Forms

FinePrint's stationery and forms are the equivalent of pre-printed paper. Stationery is an easily customized, watermarked or plain sheet, with a single line header and footer. Forms are backgrounds for document pages, such as letterhead or invoices.

Forms must be designed in other applications, but getting them into FinePrint is easy. A form can be either one or two pages. A "first page only" form option is available, which applies the first page of the form to the document's first page, and the second form page to the rest.

Unfortunately, FinePrint does not recognize individual documents when applying forms. It applies the first-page-only rule to the entire print batch, so if you queue three letters, only the first page of the first letter gets the letterhead.

Support

I emailed FinePrint support several times, to ask questions or report a problem. Each time, I received a helpful, courteous reply within a few hours.