A lot of boardgame publishers provide PDFs of their instruction manuals. These are rarely a standard page size, and often a standard size won't fit in the box. The white boarders of a full-size, printed manual can be cut off, but then it either needs stapled in the top corner (like a report) or stapled on an edge. Both of those are ugly options.
Printing them as a booklet could be a solution. Booklets of full, letter size documents come out really nice. Unfortunately, Acrobat centers each of the smaller-than-letter pages inside a white boarder instead of connecting the printed areas in the center of the paper and bordering just the outsides. Thus, the booklet doesn't print in a way to make a nice booklet. Even if I cut down the outer edges, there is a weird-looking white "spine" (i.e. the red box in the image).
How can I "mush" the pages together so that when printed, it will make a nice booklet? So it prints like this:
Thanks!
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Replies
Your answer was not helpful at all:
- Sizing is not available in booklet mode:
- The pictures are clearly for "11 x 8.5 inches", so not A4 or A5.
- How could the printer's "fit to page" possibly insert a blank space in the middle of the page Adobe created from two pages? (Also, it's not enabled.) My question isn't about sharpness, so why mention it?
- I don't want to scale the pages. I want to print them actual size, but in booklet mode without an artificial space between them.
The whole point of booklet mode is to produce a booklet. With full-sized "metric" (i.e. A3/4/5) pages, that is easy because the proportions of half a sheet match that of the full sheet. With imperial (i.e. letter) pages, the "half-sized" pages will touch in the middle with some whitespace top and bottom (i.e. along the long side of a sheet). However, with any non-standard size, why in the world would Acrobat not place the two sides of pages that should be next to each other and add whitespace on the outsides? Who would ever want a booklet with a huge whitespace margin in the middle of the booklet?
The pages are 3.94 x 5.83 inches. If I print them "actual size" I get this:
and if I want to produce a booklet using the full size of the pages, I get the something like the image in my OP (where I added the red rectangle). I modified that picture to show what I want to print.
I created a document with 12 pages at 4 x 5.875 inches. To visually identify the pages, I put a cyan box on the left page and a magenta box on the right. Then made a PDF. (Note: I am on Windows.)
In Acrobat:
Go to the Print menu.
Select the Adobe PDF print driver.
Click on Properties button.
In the new dialog box, click on the Layout tab.
Click on the Advanced button.
Change the scaling to 200%. (Adjust percentage as needed.)
Click OK back to the original Print dialog box.
Create combined PDF.
Open new PDF and print duplex.
I think I see what you are doing... In booklet mode, increase the scale enough to fill the sheet (effectively removing the whitespace between the two pages) and save it (i.e. print) to a new PDF. Then print that at a smaller scale and NOT in booklet mode, but because Acrobat now sees every two orginal pages as one, they will remain next to each other.
That would work for some/many things, including this example case, I think. However:
- It will not work for items that aren't approximately the same proportions as a sheet of paper, for example, a very tall and narrow set of pages. If you had a height/width ration of 3-to-1, scaling up in booklet form would lose information at the top and bottom of the pages before the sides "met" in the middle of the sheet.
- When I did it with my example, the preview would show the pages filling the letter size sheet, but when the saved document was opened, it was "broken". For example:
results in the following document:
On the one hand, the pages are together, and having them in a corner is useful for trimming. On the other hand, they aren't any larger, and not all the pages line up (which I can't really show here). Maybe this is a bug in Acrobat?
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