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16 October 2023

Printing Inserts


For many years I've used Booklet Print to print my Philofaxy inserts on to A4 paper, this prints all the pages double sided as A5, four pages per sheet. 

All I then had to do was cut the sheets in half and punch them. Easy..... or it was..

A couple of years ago Booklet printing vanished from the print options. The problem I had was who was responsible for this change was it:

  • Microsoft, because of a change/update to Office365
  • Apple for upgrading MacOS
  • HP for changing the printer driver on MacOS
I searched the internet for answers on all three support sites above, but apart from finding lots of people asking the same questions, I got no closer to finding what the cause was. 

To get around the issue I discovered that my old iMac running an older version of MacOS and therefore an older (no longer supported - in big warning messages) version of Office (Word) did have booklet printing. I was therefore able to print off my inserts using that machine, to the same printer as before. Problem solved. 

Well sort of.... I did the same trick the following year as well, but this really wasn't going to be a long term solution I wanted to get to the bottom of why booklet printing was no longer available. 

I discovered that the culprit was MS Office 365. They had replaced 'Booklet Printing', with 'Book Fold Layout'

This change however is not going to be a simple settings change, it will mean a redesign of the diary inserts files to be able to use it. Back to square one ! I will need to have a discussion with Ray Blake before considering this change. 

I've printed this year's inserts straight on to A5 paper, printing the odd numbered pages first. Putting the paper stack on a flat surface with a stack of heavy books on top of them to take any curve out of the paper before printing all the even numbered pages. Then just punching them and curving the corners. 

Printing the PDF files will do the trick:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/using/ways-print-pdfs.html


 

2 comments:

  1. I use A5 too and have inserted the text / table as images on A4, which allows for easy resizing/rotation. Then after a bit of trial and error print 2 sided and flip on long edge.

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  2. I thought it was just me. Thanks Steve.

    ReplyDelete