Daniel Harris said:
I want to make a booklet.
Is there any way I can have two pages on one A4 page, each with its own
header and footer, or do I have to do the whole document like normal and
then set my printer to print two pages on each page?
Daniel
It is much easier to do the latter. You do have to put up with the
geometric reduction not being quite right. e.g. In real fonts, 6pt
Times is not the same as 12pt half size.
I did a bit of work on this a while ago and wrote out a recipe, which
needs updating. (see last para) Would you be kind enough to tell me if
it works and which bits are hard to understand?
First. Three caveats.
1. Your printer needs to deliver face down after printing on the top
face of the sheets in the input tray. This is normal for mid-price
printers.
2. You need OS X 10.3.x aka Panther and its vastly improved "Preview"
program and new print options.
3. This method is suitable for perfect binding or wire-o binding. It is
no good for folded or stitched binding. For that, you need a proper
imposition program. I have never seen a free one.
I am teaching myself objective-C and Cocoa programming. Maybe, if the
printing framework is simple enough, I'll set myself an exercise. Don't
hold your breath.
Here we go
Preparation. (optional) Set your doc in a template with even and odd
headers, mirrored margins and a small gutter. It is very useful to have
page numbers in the footer, at least while you practice. Make sure it
will print in entirety as a single PDF (Some Section changes split the
output PDFs)
Recipe.
1. Print from Word with these settings Paper handling - even pages only
Output options = print to file - postscript call the output file
something like mydoc evens.ps
2. Print again from Word with these settings Paper handling - odd pages
only Output options = print to file - postscript call the output file
something like mydoc odds.ps
3. Forget Word now. Open mydoc evens.ps in Preview. Print from Preview
with these settings. Layout - 2 pages per sheet, print order 21 Paper
handling - reverse print order
4. Take the paper off the output tray, and without turning it in any
direction or shuffling the paper, put it all back in the input tray.
5. Open mydoc odds.ps in Preview Print from Preview with these
settings. Layout - 2 pages per sheet, print order 12
6 Guillotine the A4 in half to make two heaps of A5
7 Merge the two heaps page by page, turning one over from each pair.
8 Bind and trim
The sequence of printing the evens in reverse before the odds forward
seems to free you from worry about the number of pages being divisible
by 4 and causes the minimum of hand collating afterward.
Printing as postscript in print from Word stops it trying to outsmart
you, and as a bonus, works around the bug that prints your eps logo art
from the preview bitmap.
If you try this, I'd very much appreciate comments on success or
failure. Beth has asked me to write it up properly for the MVPs site.
I'd rather not look too stupid in front a wider audience. We are all
friends here right?
