Best way of approaching booklet printing

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John Gray
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Best way of approaching booklet printing

Post by John Gray »

I am intending to print four identical A6-sized form layouts on the front, and the same on the back, of a piece of A4 in landscape mode. This will be done multiple times. See attachment:
Complicated A6-sized Forms.docx
The resulting A4 page will be cut into four pieces, and about 10 of these A6 pages will placed together to form a booklet of multiple sheets, stapled at the centre.

My printer has a number of allegedly Useful Options in its driver, allowing 4-on-1 printing, automatic duplex, and "booklet printing" (which is fairly unintelligible but seems to relate to making an A5-size booklet out of A4 paper sheets).

I am not clear how best to do this in Word 2010 with minimum effort. Ideally I would like to set the form up only once, perhaps for A6-size paper (which will have to be set up as Custom by specifying the dimensions of A6). Then it could be copied seven times to give eight identical pages, to enable it to be printed four times on the front and four times on the back of the A4 sheet of paper.

I hope most of this makes sense, and any useful suggestions would be appreciated!
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John Gray

Venison is quiet deer, and quite dear.

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StuartR
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Re: Best way of approaching booklet printing

Post by StuartR »

I think the easiest way to do this is to scale everything up so that it makes a complicated A4 sized form, then copy/paste to make 8 identical pages.
You can then print this and specify 4 pages per sheet, flip on short edge.
StuartR


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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Best way of approaching booklet printing

Post by ChrisGreaves »

John Gray wrote:
28 Dec 2021, 10:41
I am intending to print four identical A6-sized form layouts on the front, and the same on the back, of a piece of A4 in landscape mode. This will be done multiple times. ... The resulting A4 page will be cut into four pieces, and about 10 of these A6 pages will placed together to form a booklet of multiple sheets, stapled at the centre.
Hi John.
I recall looking at this some ten or fifteen years ago for a client.

I took a sheet of paper and folded it twice to make a booklet of smaller size. The booklet was not separate pages as I had not cut through the creases, nor did I want to. On each page of the folded paper booklet I wrote "page nn" to identify each such page, its orientation and sequence, then unfolded the sheet to see where each of 4+4 "pages" should be printed.

The unfolded sheet showed me how to map each reduced-size page of my MSWord document to a specific quadrant of each side of a full-size sheet of A4. I then had to format/layout each reduced sheet individually with its final page number "page nn" in place, and move that block of text to a specific cell of a 4x4 table in the host document.
Since the client wanted more than 2x2x2 pages in the booklet, I was effectively folding more than one sheet of paper, but the process for the first eight pages just had to be repeated for each set of 8 pages.

I could have used the unfolded sheet to determine the algorithm to print individual pages full- or 3/4-size for a complete book, but we did not have binding facilities, so staples it was, and that limited the number of pages.

As I type I remember too using the services of Asquith at The Toronto Reference Library to self-publish a little book of about fifty pages. I did not have to go through the paper-folding technique. I submitted an MSWord document laid out as i wanted it, and their software made a ready-for-press book. I was allowed to watch the book being printed, bound and trimmed etc. Quite a fascinating project.

Such a facility is probably available at libraries in cathedral cities across the UK!

I hope that this makes sense.
Cheers
Chris
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Jay Freedman
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Re: Best way of approaching booklet printing

Post by Jay Freedman »

Stuart's approach is good, but there's an even easier way.

Create the one-page form as an A4 document. Go to the Print page, open the "1 Page per Sheet" dropdown at the bottom, and choose "4 Pages per Sheet". Just below the Settings heading, choose Print Custom Range. Fill in the Pages box with 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 (that is, eight 1s separated by commas). If your printer can do automatic duplexing, below that choose "Print on Both Sides". If the printer can't do automatic duplex, choose "Manually Print on Both Sides". Click the Print button.

The "4 Pages per Sheet" setting will reduce the A4 layout to half-size and place each of the eight copies on one quarter of an A4 sheet.

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John Gray
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Re: Best way of approaching booklet printing

Post by John Gray »

Thanks, everyone. I can now begin work on 'designing' the form, secure in the knowledge that it will print out properly.
I particularly like the multiple specification of page 1 in the printing!
John Gray

Venison is quiet deer, and quite dear.