How to print a booklet at 100%

Report · Jul 24, 2015

How can I print a booklet at 100%? When I print a booklet from Acrobat, it shrinks it slightly, about 5% or so (which I guessing is scale to fit). But I need the booklet printed at exactly 100%. Is this possible?

I have every version of Acrobat from version 9 all the way up to DC, so I can use whichever one that will get the job done. I am on a mac.

Report · Jan 05, 2017

Unfortunately, the Print Booklet feature in Acrobat was designed to fit the logical pages of the booklet into the printable region of the physical pages. That means that unless your printer supports edge-to-edge printing (most toner and inkjet desktop and enterprise printers don't support this), the pages are shrunk into that printable region.

For PostScript printers, the printable region is determined by entries in the PPD file. You could conceivably edit the PostScript printer's PPD file to force the imageable area to match the physical page sizes, although this is a fairly non-trivial task. For non-PostScript printers, the imageable area may in fact be hard coded into the printer driver.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

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Report · May 10, 2023

Thanks for all the suggestions here, but my problem appeared to be that I had used Word "print to PDF" instead of "save to PDF" to save the original document. With the "print to PDF" version, I was running into the 1" margins that couldn't be changed so the booklet pages were much smaller than intended. After opening the "Save to PDF" version, Acrobat printed the booklet just fine. Why did I use "print to PDF"? Well, I'm old and habits learned years ago still persist.

Report · May 10, 2023

Interesting. I have used "print" or "save" interchangeably and never knew they were functionally different. Unfortunately the one I was having a problem with was prepared by someone else and I can't ask them to redo it.