What’s going wrong with printing the mini booklet

ms officepdfpreviewprintingword-processor

I’m preparing a miniature book-style document—that is, I plan on stacking the sheets one on top of the other and binding them in the center, where two portrait pages are printed on each side of the landscape US letter sheet of paper.

I’m working with 2016 Microsoft Word for Mac (version 15.24) and OS X El Capitan (version 10.11.6).

The first thing I noticed was that the Mac version does not seem to have a feature that automatically prints documents booklet style. Therefore, I edited the page setup within Microsoft Word so that each page has the dimensions 5.5” × 8.5” (exactly half of a US letter sheet). Then, I exported the document as a PDF and rearranged the pages appropriately so that I could bind the document as a booklet in the middle (as opposed to a packet with a staple in the corner).

The problem occurs when I select my paper size in print preview:

It appears that when I select “US Letter” as my paper size with “2 Pages per Sheet,” Preview automatically prints two scaled-down US letter pages on one US letter sheet rather than letting each half-US-letter page take up half of the sheet. As a result, I have a large margin of dead space around each page of content.

Are there any ways to troubleshoot this problem? How can I ‘outsmart’ the system so that my content takes up the entire sheet?

_{I am not a frequent visitor on this site, so please adjust the tags if appropriate.}

Edit: I’ve been meaning to order A4 paper anyways since I’m an international student and I like its dimensions better anyways. I have some coming in on Monday, and the proportions of A4 paper will resolve the issue. Nevertheless, I would still like to be able to print booklets on US letter paper, just to know how.

Best Answer

Although MacOS doesn't comes with a built-in booklet maker, there are a number of ready-made options to avoid doing this manually.

PDFs can be easily manipulated ("imposed") into booklet spreads, and there are several apps to do this, both on the Mac App Store and on developers' websites. Some are free, some are very cheap.

Adobe Reader contains a booklet setting in its print menu.

You can find a "PDF Service", which will make booklet PDFs and save them to disk here. You will need to install it in your user Library's "PDF Services" folder, which may need creating if not present. Then it will be available in the PDF button of every print dialog. (It's currently set for A3, but there's an option in the script to change the paper size.)

Some Printer drivers have the function built-in, particularly on large-sheet printers.

Related Solutions

How to print a booklet from a pdf file

For a free and universal alternative you can use the pdfbook script, part of the pdfjam collection which is usually included in LaTeX distributions (notably MacTeX). It's simple to use from the command line:

pdfbook mypdf.pdf

If the above doesn't work, then /Library/TeX/texbin isn't in your PATH (or /usr/texbin for older versions of MacTeX). The best course of action is to ensure PATH is correctly set (lots of command line programs will fail if the PATH variable isn't correct and pdfbook is one of them); this isn't trivial under OS X if you want a consistent behavior between applications launched from the dock and applications run from a terminal so you definitely should search a complete solution to this specific problem. As dirty work-around, you can run export PATH="$PATH:/Library/TeX/texbin:/usr/texbin" every time before you use pdfbook (including in the service below).

If you don't want to use the command line, you can create a service easily.

Launch Automator (on Yosemite it's in Applications/Others)
Create a new document and select "Service".
On top of the right frame, for "Service receives selected" choose "PDF files".
Search "Run Shell Script" from the bar on the top of the left frame and double-click it. Select to "Pass input" as "arguments" in the newly created window.
Enter a simple script running pdfbook, for instance pdfbook "$@".
Save it as "Create booklet" (for instance).
In Finder, select a PDF file, then in the menu go to Services/Create booklet.

My complete script also creates a temporary file and opens the resulting PDF:

TMPF=`mktemp -t bookletXXXX`
mv "$TMPF" "$TMPF.pdf"
pdfbook -o "$TMPF.pdf" "$@"
open "$TMPF.pdf"

The most obvious problem is the several GB download and installation of a LaTeX distribution if all you want is the pdfbook script.

IOS – How to print multiple pages on a single page via the iPhone

I am not aware of any apps that can do that. You certainly can't print handouts with the native printing menu.

You could create the handout document on a computer and then click the "Save as PDF" option in the print dialogue. Then you could transfer the PDF handout file to your iPhone, which you could then print from there.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to print a booklet from a pdf file

IOS – How to print multiple pages on a single page via the iPhone

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