Make a folded booklet from a PDF

How do you print a PDF as a booklet?

Drop the PDF in, press Save PDF, then print the result double-sided flipping on the short edge, and fold the stack in half. What comes out is an A5 booklet with the pages in the right order. The tool does the reordering; your printer does the rest.

What it produces is a landscape A4 document with two of your pages side by side on each side of the paper — but not in the order you would expect, which is the whole trick.

Why are the pages in a strange order?

Because a folded booklet needs them that way. When you fold a stack of paper in half, the outermost sheet carries page one and the very last page on one side, and pages two and the second-to-last on the other. Only the middle sheet has consecutive pages on it.

This is called imposition, and doing it by hand is where most people give up on the idea. For an eight-page booklet the sheets come out as 8–1, 2–7, 6–3, 4–5. Print those two-sided, fold, and it reads straight through.

Why does it have to be a multiple of four?

Because every sheet of paper folded in half produces four pages — two on the front, two on the back. There is no way to have a folded booklet of six pages. If your document is not a multiple of four, blank pages are added at the end to make it one, and the tool says how many it added.

If those blanks bother you, take a page out first with the page organiser, or add something to fill them — a notes page or a back cover is the usual answer.

Short edge or long edge?

Short edge. This is the setting everybody gets wrong, and the symptom is unmistakable: every second page comes out upside down. Because the sheets are landscape, flipping on the long edge turns the back of each sheet the wrong way up.

It is usually in the print dialogue as “two-sided” with a choice of “flip on short edge” or “flip on long edge”. If your printer cannot do two-sided at all, print the odd sides first, put the stack back in, and run the even sides — and test with four sheets before committing thirty.

What size does the booklet come out?

A5, from A4 paper — half of a sheet, which is the size of an exercise book turned sideways. Your original page content is scaled down to fit that half, so a densely typed A4 page becomes small. Anything with 11-point text will be about 8-point in the booklet, which is fine for adults and not for a Year 2 reader.

What do teachers actually make as booklets?

Revision guides, home learning packs, a class anthology of writing, reading records, topic booklets, transition information for parents, and the little books children write themselves. The last one is the best use of it — a child’s story printed and folded into an actual book is worth a great deal more to them than the same words on loose sheets.

Booklet, or several pages on one sheet?

Both put two pages on a side of paper, and there the resemblance ends. A booklet is reordered for folding — the pages are deliberately out of sequence and it only reads correctly once it is folded. Multi-up stays in reading order and is meant to be handed over flat. If you are not going to fold and staple it, you want multi-up.