Booklets: Print and Fold How to print a bunch of pages that you can fold in half and staple to create a booklet. Contributed by For a quick-and-easy booklet using standard letter paper: • create your document in Word (or Pages) as you normally would • use one of the OS X to shuffle the pages around and place them 2-up • from Preview My discussion here, if you choose to read it, explains what is going on in the booklet-making process, discusses your options for booklet programs, notes some possible pitfalls with duplex printing, and offers some cosmetic refinements. This is by no means an authoritative article, but recently I was helping someone develop a workflow for creating booklets, and here are the results of my experimentation.
Note: It is sometimes suggested using linked text boxes. It's much easier to use one of the, especially if you are not already familiar with text boxes in MS Word. Text boxes can be complicated, and at least two of the booklet programs are free. Problem There are several issues involved in making booklets that are created by folding standard letter paper in half. One: imposition. The pages need to be re-ordered so that folding in half produces the right order.
Click Double. The entire document is now double-spaced. To double-space a specific area of text, highlight the text, click the Line and Paragraph Spacing button on the Home tab (4 horizontal lines with two blue arrows), then select 2.0.
This is called imposition, and a number of OS X have been developed specifically to take care of this (listed below). 8 pages in booklet order 8 1 2 7 6 3 4 5 8 page document printed 2-up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Two: zoom. When you print two pages per sheet (also called 2-up) on a letter-size piece of paper, the text obviously needs to be shrunk. However, the proportions are different. So if you design two 8.5x11 pages, and print them 2-up, the half-piece is proportionally taller than the full-size piece, meaning you get extra blank margin at the top and bottom of the half-piece.
To solve this issue, I used a custom page size of 5.5x8.5, instead of simply shrinking an 8.5x11 document. Three: creep. If you are printing a very thick booklet, and folding it in half, you also need to worry about creep—the outside pages need a bigger gutter in the middle because they are being folded so thickly. I didn’t worry about this. Now, my friends previously used PrintChef in OS 9, which would reorder the pages and also stretch the text to fill out that extra top/bottom margin.
Unfortunately PrintChef has not been ported to OS X, and at this point, it seems unlikely that it ever will be. My task was to find a substitute for PrintChef, as running OS 9 was no longer a feasible alternative (apparently it keeps crashing the computer). Is another major booklet program, apparently quite sophisticated, but my friends have an equally sophisticated printer with a complicated duplex process that conflicted with ClickBook. Instead, I turned to the three OS X booklet programs that I knew about. The Booklet Programs You will need to download and install at least one of these three programs. I wound up using CocoaBooklet, but all three of these programs work the same way.
You generate a PDF file from whatever word processing program you choose, thus setting the page breaks. The booklet application takes the PDF file, shuffles around the existing pages, and shrinks them down to two pages per sheet, creating a new PDF booklet.
You then print that PDF booklet from Preview. • BookLightning • • CocoaBooklet Here are my impressions of these three programs. My tests were all done on 8-page booklets.
I wasn’t particularly concerned with speed or with printing very large booklets, so if those are important to you, you should probably do your own testing. The programs are small to download (max 4MB) and easy to figure out. BookLightning v. 1.5: BookLightning had fewer preferences than the other two programs, so less things the user could control, yet seemed to work just as well when I tested it on the 5.5x8.5 booklet. Might not work with certain duplex mechanisms, see next section. ($50; if you don’t request a free demo license, your test files will have a bright red line across them.) Cheap Impostor 2.3: Excellent documentation.
In fact, I wanted to pay for the advanced features just because the developer took the time to write such good help, including how to make your own book. However, Cheap Impostor in basic (free) mode shrank the custom page size too much, and I could not quite tell whether the advanced features would allow me to stretch the text on a shrunken regular page, though I thought they might. They would certainly have let me control for the smaller page size. The advanced features did promise to deal with creep, and in general, Cheap Impostor seemed to allow the user to control the most aspects of creating a booklet. (free basic version, $35 for advanced features.) CocoaBooklet 1.3.3: CocoaBooklet had more options than BookLightning but fewer than Cheap Impostor. It worked very well for my purposes and offers an amazing amount of control for a free program. I decided it was the best choice for my needs.