Save my booklet PDF

[radiuse29107264]

I need to make booklets quite often (concert programs for professional chamber music group) - letter size paper folded in half, paginated in the final step so I can do the layout sequentially. Until recently I just used Word's "booklet fold" mode on my PC and voila: perfect PDF in booklet mode (1-12-2-11-3-10-4-9-5-8-6-7) ready for my print company (Staples) to print.\

Now I've moved over to a Mac and the booklet mode in Word for Mac is a horror show. I have played around with this for quite some time and am confident this is not going to work reliably. Instead, I have reformatted my template to half a letter size page (5.5 x 8.5) and saved it as PDF. I open it in Acrobat and can choose booklet mode to print, which does the pagination for me, yay! But I can't save the resulting output as a PDF to send to my print company. I have tried using PDF writer but get an error message that the file is corrupted. I have tried Foxit (no booklet mode). Any other PDF writers that would allow me to generate a PDF from a PDF? I used to do this all the time on Windows.

I suppose I could send the print company the sequential PDF and trust them to use booklet mode output when sending the file to their printer but it seems a lot safer to send them a PDF already formatted for printing on letter size paper, 2 up and paginated.

Hope this question makes sense and you have some ideas for me. Thanks in advance.

[Thom Parker]

What you're talking about in called imposition. All the pros use Quite Imposing. 

[radiuse29107264]

Thank you! I will check that out.

[radiuse29107264]

Yikes, $899 for a single license. Too much for this tiny nonprofit arts org. Other solutions or ideas gratefully accepted!

[JR Boulay]

Create Booklet is a must have: https://apps.apple.com/app/create-booklet-2/id1350225911

[radiuse29107264 · Accepted solution]

For anyone who is reading this with the same problem:

Thanks to @Thom_Parker I learned that what I needed was called imposition and from there it was pretty easy to find a program that did what I needed. I ultimately chose Cheap Impostor, $35. http://www.cheapimpostor.com/