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The easiest way I’ve found to make a booklet

By Ben ⋅ 24th Sep 2009 ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

From time to time I’ve had to make a booklet for a camp or bible study or something – you know the ones where you have to shuffle the pages and hope that page 8 follows page 7 etc…

Here is a great little bit of software which makes it a cinch.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/86349

It adds an item to the ‘PDF’ menu in the Mac OS Print panel called ‘Create Booklet’
pdfmenu

It then automatically adds blank pages until your document has a number of pages that is a multiple of 4. Then shuffles them up without making any mistakes and lays them out side by side on paper that is twice as big as your original document (so make your document in A5 if you want to print onto A4). Finally it saves a PDF on your desktop that you can then print away.

Still need to find a big stapler, but it takes out most of the pain.

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Discussion

2 comments for “The easiest way I’ve found to make a booklet”

  1. Posted by Bernie | 28th Sep 2009, 2:00 pm

    Ben, you’re a genius. I know you didn’t write the software (did you??), but I *love* the fact that you’ve pointed me to it.

  2. Posted by Ben Hudson | 28th Sep 2009, 11:34 pm

    Here’s another tip for using the Mac OS print features.

    There’s a set of options called ‘Paper Handling’, one of which allows you scale the document to any paper size.

    So if you did your original booklet in A4, that’s cool. ‘Create Booklet’ will make an A3 landscape pdf file. You can then ’scale to A4′ when you print…

    … which turns out a nice A5 booklet when you fold it in half.

    Confusing hey – it makes sense if you give it a go.

    here’s my final booklet tip: staple first then fold.

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