Saving 2 pages of Indesign file to one Page PDF file

Question

I have a document in Indesign with a page size of 5x7 and 20 pages. I would like to produce a PDF with two 5x7 pages per letter page so my client can print this themselves. Strangely I can't find a quick way around this. I've tried making a PDF of the initial 5x7 document .and then importing it into another Indesign file ready with new picture boxes for insertion. Each time I only get ONE page of the PDF even when I use the "options" and select the entire document.

I've tried printing and when I try to use "save as PDF" I get the message that "Saving a PDF file when printing is not supported. Instead, choose File > Save" which does not allow me to get 2 of the 5x7 pages onto one page.

The only way I've found is to select each picture box individually in Indesign and then select the correct page from the PDF. That means 20 selections. Is there no faster way to do this?

I've seen the scripts but they only allow ONE page of PDF to import to ONE page of the Indesign file.

I want TWO pages of PDF to ONE page of final file (either Indesign or Acrobat PDF).
I can't even get it to work using Distiller.

Document Geek · Accepted Answer

When you are importing the file into your "pictire boxes" (technically called
graphic frames) in InDesign, by chance do you have one of those frames selected when you're strying to place the document? If so, you'll only get a single page that's placed.

So undo the first place operation, deselect the frame, (your cursor should still be loaded with all the pages of the PDF), and then click once on each frame.

If you have your frames set up properly, and don't have any of them selected, you should be able to import all the pages if the PDF and click, click, click, once one each frame, and it will automatically place each page.

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

The correct way to create such an imposed document from InDesign is to use the File>Print Booklet function, and not rely on the print feature on the print dialog. This way, you have much more control over how the file gets imposed (in this case, two pages assembled on one physical page). However, just like the method you've found, this featuer has the term "print" in it's name, and it assumes you want to print the file. On a Windows system, you could just print to the Adobe PDF printer and be done, but on a Mac, we don't have access to that feature. Unfortunately, on a Mac, if you want to accompish this, you need to hack the print subsystem to create a "print to PostScript" printer, or you need to get an imposition solution that works on the PDF side as an Acrobat plug-in. For many years I've used the Quite Imposing Plus plugin to do things like that (www.quite.com). If you can run InDesign (or Acrobat) on a Windows system, then this step would be much easier.

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