# Creep Compensation

Creep or (Shingling) is the shifting position of the page in a saddle-stitched bind. Creep moves the inside pages away from the spine. Said differently, each inner sheet is inserted (nested) in the next one and so on. This means that a sheet of paper wraps around a slightly narrower one.

In the real printing world, creep is cut out so the book you buy has a perfectly straight outside edge. As the creep shifting can be important, printing services can decide to apply an offset correction to avoid your content text to be cut with the paper when removing creep (e.g. the page number that could be placed too close to the edge).

To give you full power over your work, Create Booklet provides you such a professional feature. When selected, Create Booklet will automatically offset each page of a sheet based on it's position in the booklet to compensate the creep effect depending on the selected paper weight or manually inputed offset.

Once your booklet printed, simply cut the creep as below without risking to cut your content.

### Setting up your perfect creep compensation

We have some default settings, but those are only rought estimations. The creep depends on your exact paper and the way you fold it. E.g. when you have a press available there is much less creep, while there is much more if you have very stiff paper and are folding it by hand.

To get your personal creep take a thick stack of your printing paper, e.g. 20 sheets (or whatever your booklets are typically like) and fold them. Now measure how much the middle stands out from the most outside sheet. If you are not perfectly symmetrical, simply measure both sides and devide the sum by two. Finally divide that distance by the number of sheet you have folded minus one.

E.g. When you take 20 sheets of 80 g/m2 paper, the middle stands out about 3.4 mm, so

3.4 mm 20 - 1 = 3.4 mm 19≈0.18 mm

So now go to the Creep Compensation settings and select creep in mm and then enter 0.18 into the text field.