Creating an A4 Portrait (long) fold booklet

Fenjas is steering you the right way toward creating your booklet.

1) Design your document as single-page, with half your A4 size (148.5mm wide by 210mm deep). Set your margins as you'd like, with a little extra margin to the inside to account for the binding "saddle", as illustrated below:

(margins offered as an example - your mileage may vary)

2) Lay out your document, keeping in mind that the final version of the document has to have a page count divisible by four. If it doesn't, you'll have to insert pages to meet that count. You can do that manually, or you can do it through the "Print Booklet" function described later. Forget about editing the booklet when you produce the final version. You need to get it right before you produce the final booklet, or you need to make your corrections then produce the booklet again. Creating a booklet with InDesign is a printing function, it is not a production function.

3) When you're ready to produce your booklet, you can use the Print Booklet function to build your printer's spreads, like the example below:

You'll realize from the subsequent comments that will undoubtedly follow this one, that using this function is somewhat controversial. By my experience, it works pretty well. Select the File>Print Booklet... menu command to open this function.

4) I'm going to use a poetry book I'm producing for a client, laid out in letter-half format, for my examples here. It's currently at 49 pages, so I'll have to add a minimum of 3 pages to meet the multiples of 4 rule outlined above. Set the Booklet Type: options box for 2-up Saddle Stitch, then click the Preview option to the left to see how your book will be produced. By default, the previous dialog box showed the default printer you use. It uses the default settings you have set up on your system. Most likely, they'll have nothing to do with how you want to produce your booklet. As illustrated below, mine doesn't either.

You have to fix that. Click the Print Settings... button, as shown above.

5) This opens your Print dialog box. It looks like it would if you were printing anything out of InDesign with one significant exception: It doesn't give you a preview in the proxy window at the lower-left. So we're flying blind here, but we have an idea what we need to do so we can live with this limitation and deal with it in the Preview section later.

1. In the Setup section, Change the Paper Size: options box to A4 and the Orientation: to Landscape (the second proxy, where the page looks wide and the little person's head points to the left). Then set the Page Position: options box to Centered -- just for safety's sake.
2. Click the OK button to go back to the Preview proxy.

6) This returns us to the Preview proxy. It's automatically entered the three extra pages for me in what InDesign considers the least intrusive options; the back cover, inside back cover, and the last facing page inside the back cover. It's also transformed your booklet into conventional printer spreads -- page numbers add up to one more than the total number of pages (for our now 52-page book, 6-47, 46-7, 8-45, etc.) with the odd-numbered page to the right of each spread. If you were going to print the book directly from here, you'd be good to go.

This wouldn't work for me, because I'd want to put the blank pages in different positions. That's why I recommend that you insert the blank page positions manually. But for the sake of this lesson, we'll accept those positions as is.

But you want to see it before you print it. That's smart, but it requires us to click the Print Settings... button one more time.

7) I'm using a Mac to illustrate this lesson. If you're on a Windows-based system, you'd just select the Adobe PDF option in your Printer: options box and create the PDF with your printer spreads and be done with it. On Macs, there are extra steps. Click on the Printer... button to open that dialog box. On my MacMini, InDesign refused to create a PDF and told me the function wasn't supported. This may be because the latest Mac version of Adobe Acrobat does not support my common PostScript laser printer. Yours may or may not either. But we're not entirely out of luck. Go to the PDF options box again and select Save as PostScript...

Navigate your way to where you want to save it. Name the file, then save it. Then work your way out to the Print Booklet dialog and click the Print button. You'll have to use Acrobat Distiller to create your PDF. The job turns out fine, with the printer spreads you are looking for.

If this process works well for you, as I suspect it will, please mark your question in this forum as answered. This flags the moderators to place the question into archives, where others who may have the same problem can benefit from this answer as well. Good luck with your work.