Printing an ebook as a folded booklet

A booklet is a stack of sheets folded once down the middle and stapled through the fold. Four book pages to a sheet, two on each side. It’s how every pamphlet, church newsletter and conference programme you’ve ever held was made, and it’s the cheapest way to turn an ebook into something that behaves like a book.

It’s also the answer to the complaint in why an EPUB looks wrong when you just print it: a stack of loose A4 isn’t a book, and no amount of care over the margins makes it one.

It takes two things: a PDF at the right page size, and a printer that knows how to impose it. This converter does the first. The second belongs to your print dialog, and that split is the part people get stuck on.

The two halves of the job

Making the pages is deciding that the finished thing is A5, and setting the type for A5: margins in proportion, a sensible measure, page numbers where they belong. That’s a conversion setting and it happens here.

Imposing the pages is working out that on a sheet of A4, page 1 sits on the right of the back and page 2 on the left of the front, and page 3 is somewhere entirely different depending on how thick the booklet is. That’s a printing operation, and your printer driver, Acrobat Reader and macOS Preview all do it. This converter doesn’t, and won’t: it’s a decision that depends on your paper and your stapler, not on your book.

So the workflow is: convert to A5, then print the A5 PDF as a booklet onto A4.

Settings for the conversion

Page size: A5. Two A5 pages fit exactly on one A4 sheet, which is the whole point of the A series. If you’re on US paper, pick B6 and print onto Letter, or accept a narrow strip of waste down one edge.

Margins: normal. It’s tempting to go narrow because the page is small. Don’t. The fold eats into the inner margin on every sheet, and a booklet with narrow margins has text disappearing into the crease. If you’re making something thick, over about 60 sheets, go wide.

Type size: 10pt. On a page this small, 11pt starts to look like a large-print edition and pushes the page count up sharply. 10pt on A5 is close to a mass-market paperback.

Justification: off. This is the one that surprises people. A5 at 10pt gives you a narrow column, and this converter doesn’t hyphenate, so justified text has to stretch its spaces to reach the right margin. On a wide A4 page you’d never notice. At booklet width you get rivers of white running down the paragraph. Ragged-right looks better. There’s more on why in choosing a page size and margins.

Page furniture: on. Page numbers matter more in a booklet than anywhere else, because when you drop it you have to reassemble it.

The page-count rule

A folded sheet is four pages. So a booklet is always a multiple of four pages: 4, 8, 12, 16 and so on. If your book comes out at 62 pages, the printer will pad it to 64 with two blanks, and it decides where they go. Usually the end, sometimes not.

This matters if you care where the blanks land. The only reliable fix is to nudge the page count deliberately: change the type size by half a point, or the margins by one step, and re-convert. Watch the estimated page count on the converter before you commit, and aim for a multiple of four, or one or two under it.

For anything over about 20 sheets of ordinary 80gsm paper, one booklet stops working. A folded stack that thick splays badly at the outer edge and won’t staple. Split it into signatures instead: several booklets of 8 or 12 sheets each, printed separately, then stacked. That’s how real books are made, and the seam is invisible once they’re together.

Printing it

The option you want is called Booklet in macOS Preview and Acrobat Reader, and usually Booklet printing or 2-up, short-edge binding in a Windows printer driver. It appears in the print dialog, not in the converter.

Whichever you use, three settings to check:

1. Scale: 100% or Actual size. If it offers to fit the A5 page onto the A4 sheet, refuse. It’ll scale your careful margins by a few per cent. There’s already exactly enough room.
2. Duplex: flip on the short edge. Long-edge flipping gives you a booklet where every second page is upside down. Everyone does this once.
3. Binding: left, for a book read left to right.

Print four pages first. Fold them. If page 2 is on the back of page 1 and the numbers run in order when you fold, the settings are right and you can print the rest.

If your printer has no booklet mode

Some cheap drivers don’t. Two ways out.

The first is to let the PDF reader do it. Acrobat Reader’s booklet mode is in the print dialog under Page Sizing & Handling, and it does the imposition itself before sending anything to the printer, so it works with any driver.

The second is to skip the fold entirely. Print A5 two-up on A4 with no imposition, guillotine the sheets down the middle, and you have a stack of loose A5 pages in order. Punch and comb-bind them. It looks less like a book, and it lies flat, which for anything you’re going to write in is a better outcome anyway. If you go this way, choose wide margins in the converter, because the punched edge takes about 15mm.

What this doesn’t do

Worth saying plainly, because these are all things a print shop would ask about:

• No imposition. Covered above. The printer does it.
• No blank pages inserted at chapter starts. Chapters begin on whichever side they fall on. Real books push each chapter to a right-hand page and accept the blank. This doesn’t, in favour of using less paper.
• No creep compensation. In a thick booklet the inner pages stick out further than the outer ones, so a bindery shifts the text a fraction of a millimetre per sheet to compensate. At 8 or 12 sheets you’ll never see it. At 30 you might.
• No bleed. Images stop at the margin rather than running off the edge, because a home printer can’t print to the edge anyway.

None of that stops you making something perfectly good. A 12-sheet A5 booklet off a domestic laser printer, folded and stapled, is a real object that people are pleased to be handed.

A worked example

A 90,000-word novel, converted at A5, 10pt, normal margins, ragged-right, comes out somewhere around 260 pages. That’s 65 sheets: far too thick for one booklet.

Split it into signatures of 8 sheets, which is 32 pages each. 260 pages is 8 full signatures and a bit, so round up to 288 pages by adjusting the type size until the estimate lands there, giving 9 signatures of exactly 32 pages. Print each one separately using the page range in the print dialog, fold, staple, then stack them in order. Glue the spines if you want to be ambitious about it.

That’s an afternoon, and about £4 of paper.

Before you start, two things worth checking: that the file will convert at all, which where to find EPUBs that will actually convert covers, and that the page numbers and contents page are on, which EPUB to PDF with page numbers explains. A booklet without page numbers is a puzzle waiting to happen.