Booklet printing


Booklet printing

Or how to print a folded booklet with numbered pages half the size of your paper

Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill

Versions of Word prior to Word 2002 don't provide any built-in way to do booklets, although Word 2000 does allow you to print more than one logical page on a physical page. The good news is that Word 2002 has the built-in ability to print booklets with automatically numbered pages.¹

If you will be doing booklets frequently, there are several third-party applications that simplify booklet printing. These include ClickBook from Blue Squirrel Software, which is basically the same software used in WordPerfect; WOPR from Woody Leonhard, and FinePrint.

You can also use one of Richard Keijzer's booklet printing macros, which are free.

If you don't want to spend money on an add-in, or use VBA; and are willing to do a bit more work yourself, here is the method I use. I've produced booklets up to 100 pages long this way, and it works quite satisfactorily for me.

Set up your document by first choosing Landscape orientation on the “Paper Size” tab of Page Setup. Then select “Mirror Margins” on the “Margins” tab. When you do this, the margin measurements for “Left” and “Right” change to “Inside” and “Outside”. Set the margins you want for your half-size page. If your booklet is to be “saddle stitched” (stapled in the center), you may want a slightly larger margin on the outside to allow for trimming. Now set the “Gutter” measurement to half the width of your paper. If you are using US Letter, this will be 5.5"; for US Legal, it will be 7". For European A4, this would be 14.85 cm (or 5.85"), and 21 cm (or 8.27") for A3. You can see from the diagram in Page Setup that the text area of your page will alternate from right (odd or recto pages) to left (even or verso pages).

As you will have figured out, this will give you one page per sheet, alternating right (odd pages) and left (even pages). Not to worry! Enter your text sequentially, page 1 through the end. You will, of course, need to have the total number of pages divisible by four, so you may need to add blanks at the end. (You can either leave them entirely blank or print “Notes” or some such at the top.)

To print, select “Odd pages” (at either the bottom-left or bottom-right of the Print dialog, depending on your Word version):

After you have printed all the odd pages, return to the Print dialog and select “Even pages”, and click the “Options” button on the Print dialog and check “Reverse print order” (remember to uncheck this when you've finished).

Feed your printed pages back through the printer to have the second page printed. You will find that (supposing you have an eight-page booklet) page 8 prints on page 1, page 6 on 3, and so on. This will give you camera-ready copy if you're planning to reproduce your booklet by printing or photocopying. If you're planning to duplex the pages yourself, you'll need to figure that out from here (you'll end up with two copies of the booklet per print operation, obviously).

If you are using Word 2000 and do want to duplex; and if don't fancy sending your paper through the printer four times, you might want to look at Richard's booklet-printing macros, which can duplex in two passes rather than four.

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You may find that there are some problems with printing specific pages (especially in longer booklets) using the Word 2002 Booklet feature, although printing the whole file works fine. You may also find that "Inside" and "Outside" margins are reversed. The latter is easy to work around by reversing the margin settings; the former may or may not be a show-stopper for you. If it is, you can still use the method discussed in this article or in the article: Macros for booklet printing.