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How to print a booklet to a legal size paper using a duplexing printer

paululrich
Registered: Jan 10 2008
Posts: 2

Have you ever tried to print a booklet using Adobe reader? I happen to have a Cannon Image runner 5000 with a duplexer attachment, and a lot of legal size paper. I tried and tried to get a textbook to print in the booklet format on my legal paper. The PDF is letter size. It kept leaving a huge margin around the page, and it shrunk the letter size print to an almost unreadable size. But, after hundreds of tries, I finally tricked it and got rid of all the white space and made my page fill up the legal size paper.

Go to File -> Print Setup
Under Paper make sure you have the following selected:
Size: Legal
Source : Drawer 3 (Or the source of your legal size paper)

Under Orientation: Landscape

Click Properties and make the following selections:
On the Page Setup tab:
Page size: Legal
Output Size: Legal
Orientation: Portrait

On the Finishing tab:
Print Style: Booklet Printing

On the Paper Source tab:
Select By: Paper Source
Paper Selection: Same paper for all pages
Paper Source: Drawer 3 (Or the source of your legal size paper)

Click OK

To print your file, go to File -> Print

Print Range: All
Pages: 1 to ## (Where ## indicates the last page of your booklet)

Page Handling:
Page Scaling: None
Auto-Rotate and Center: checked
Choose Paper Source by PDF page size: checked

Click OK to print
The preview will be an 8.5 x 11 and the image will fill the page. But when you print you will get your entire legal size page filled with 2 letter size pages per side.

If your booklet is larger than 15 pages, you should divide the booklet into sets that you can fold up, staple, and then staple those sets together. Otherwise its really hard to fold 35 page in half without it looking like crap. If you look at a book binding, you’ll see that this is the technique they use too.
On the Finishing tab, select Booklet button under Print style. Select the “Divide into Sets” radio button. Select the # of pages you want per set (12 is a good number).

Happy Printing!

Paul Ulrich
1/10/2008

leonardr
Expert
Registered: Feb 14 2006
Posts: 333
Printing of booklets as well as page scaling is built into Acrobat Standard and Professional. Moving to either of those form Reader would have saved you a lot of time and effort.

Leonard

Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems