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How to print a booklet at 100%

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
July 24, 2015
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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.

Correct answer Dov Isaacs

Did you find a solution? I have this problem as well both with print "booklet" and "multiple". Both options scale and add extra margins. I am using Acrobat DC 15.020.20042. I did not have this problem with the earlier licensed non-subscription versions of Acrobat.

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

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nes49

Participant

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.

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Steve G 23

Participant

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.

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Steve G 23

Participant

The simplest workaround is to make a copy of your pdf and crop the pages so there is no unwanted white space around the text. Then when the booklet printing layout adds page margins it will be more the way you want it.

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Lankis257707400kp7

Participant

I know this is a quiet old thread, but it is the top hit when I google for my problem.

In my case, I got a pdf file of a booklet which originally designed on a much smaller paper. Similarly as this thread, when I want to print the file as booklet, acrobat could only print the pages in original size without any scaling.

In the end I found a walk-around, so I hope this may help others:

First print the file to a new PDF file, with size set to "Fit".

Then print the new PDF file with the booklet option.

Now you can get the booklet print on A4 paper and use the whole space on the paper.

Cheers,

Jiajun

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Obskyr

Participant

Thank you – it's a bit of a circuitous workaround (and should really be built into Acrobat), but it entirely works! You've saved me.

If you, like me, have a PDF that already has some margins you'd like to negate, you can do something similar, just changing the “Fit” step:

Set the scaling to “custom”.
Enter a percentage larger than 100% that cuts the margins off sufficiently. (For my document, it was 108%.)
Print to a new PDF file using the virtual printer “Microsoft Print to PDF” or equivalent.
Open that new PDF file and print that as a booklet.

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scottlininger

Participant

This answer is not correct, at least on my printer and mac. Please see below. You can create a new page size *without margins* in the page setup dialog. No need to edit PPDs.

Dov Isaacs

Legend

That is the equivalent of editing PPDs for printable area on the MacOS side although it doesn't always work in my experiences.

- Dov

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

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Anonymous

Hi, I want to print a booklet but the only binding options are left and right. I need a middle binding option otherwise I end up with two pages on page side by side that will not bind in the centre and fold up to make a booklet.

any ideas?