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Question for those of you who print your own A5 inserts:
ReplyDeleteHow do you do it? Do you print straight on A5 or on A4 to cut?
I'm having the issue where my printer only handles A4, and cuts off a margin of 2cm on one of the short sides. So printing two A5 inserts on one A4 gets wonky, but printing one A5 on each A4 is a waste of paper... Maybe I can fiddle with settings so it can print on A5-paper.
Anyway, does anyone have any tips or tricks to share?
I print straight to A5 paper.
DeletePhilofaxy did a post on how to print
https://philofaxy.blogspot.com/2013/06/printing-your-own-diary-inserts.html?m=1
Hope this helps
I also print straight to A5. Cutting A4 would be way too much fuss for me. However, I do have an issue when printing double-sided. Even when I specify double-sided in Acrobat, only my laptop will convey this successfully to the printer. My office and home desktops both produce single-sided results.
DeleteIs there an easy way to print a pdf that's A4 sized into a personal sized, double sided print? I have booklet printed it onto A5 for my A5 finsbury but I'm curious if there's an easy and reliable way to do this to produce an information booklet for my personal filofax.
ReplyDeleteI would of course need to trim it down and cut in half before punching it. I always have issues resizing for inserts. I'll be printing on a b&w brother laser printer with automatic duplex so at least that's easier.
PaulB how many unique sides (of each page when printed) are there to the booklet, and how many copies would you like to make? I may have a suggestion, but its viability for this would depend on how many pages you need, and also how that weighs against the number of booklets you want to make.
DeleteThe one I'm thinking of firstly is 44 sides printed onto 22 personal sized sheets of paper when finished. Probably 2 per A4 page makes 11 A4 pages, cut and trimmed to personal size.
DeleteIt would likely only be one copy of each document I'd need but the ability to get more as it gets used and worn enough to need replacing.
I did think a loop stapled booklet might be an option but I doubt you can easily get the staples in the right place for filofax rings.
Okay thanks, I can walk through creating a re-usable template for making double-sided Filofax Personal pages, 2 to an A4 sheet, but it won't be anything like simply taking an A4 multi-page document and having your printer do the magic of making it into an A5 duplex booklet.
DeleteI've been trying to figure out how to talk a printer into doing this working from the A4-multi page so you'd ideally have a basically A5-sized print, which then just needs trimming on ideally three cuts per sheet, but it's too susceptible to error. Unless your printer is willing to allow you to enter eg a custom output size, by which I mean, replacing "A5" with "custom 9.5 x 17.1" etc?
Then you'd just need to cut the paper first, and have the printer scale the A4 down to your new format. However I doubt that's possible, sadly.
Mucking around creating eg "2 x Filofax Personal sized" text boxes, within each A4 page, adjusting them to give margins and room for holes, and to align, and then hoping your printer delivers a Personal-size printed booklet within A5 -sized margins is probably too much to ask.
So I don't think I can deliver on an easy way to do this utilising duplex & booklet functions. However I will copy the longer method below, just in case.
First, it needs saying that I may have a slightly higher tolerance for playing around in Word (etc) than most people. I also don't like printing Filofax-sized pages in the centre of an A4 sheet and hoping things are aligned, or having to cut things too many times. This is what I would do:
Delete1. take a piece of any A4 paper, lay it landscape
2. draw an oblong abutting the top left corner in the approx size of a Filofax Personal page and write "1" in the oblong, smallish, anywhere at the top
3. put another aligned right beside it, write "3" in that
4. turn the page over, draw the same rectangles on the top right to represent the back of the two you just drew, then the back of the rectangle with "3" in on the first side needs to have "4" written inside, the other needs "2" written in
Turn the paper back over to the side you started with:
5. Under "1" repeat "5" "9" and so on in jumps of +4, under "3" repeat "7" "11" etc, under "2" repeat "6" "10" etc, and do the same for the even numbers on the back, all the way to "44" (so 11 page numbers in each oblong)
This is a visual aide for collating and printing. You might be smarter than me and not need it. I find that once made, something like this actually gets used again for different projects.
You then convert your existing A5 booklet content to Personal size, either as:
- 44 image files, using screen-capture, then crop, from the document you have, and maybe sharpening contrast slightly in an image editing program, or
- copy the text into 44 individual documents, and number them.
You need to number these 44 image files/documents, each of which is one single page of the completed booklet, with the page number they will have when correctly printed, 1 - 44.
Next:
Call up a new A4 landscape doc in your program, I like Word, I'm not as familiar with creating in Adobe PDF.
Place a rectangular drawing object/shape (not sure what they're called in PDF) which is the exact size of a Personal page hard in that top left corner, and another one beside it. Leave a black or dark grey line around this, and white fill. This should look like a smarter and correctly sized version of the handwritten draft.
Then, to "hold" the content, and give you clearance for rings and margins within that Personal-sized page, drop into each of these rectangular page outlines, a slightly smaller rectangle, which is about 1.2cm narrower, so the holes can be punched, and shorter by the exact amount of space your printer needs at the long edge of an A4 doc, plus your desired margin of empty space at the bottom.
This smaller rectangle is where your content goes, so once you have it positioned, ideally give that a white line around the edge.
Repeat this on a new landscape doc with the page-sized rectangles up against the top right corner. If your printer is a prone to grabbing paper at a slight angle, make the borders of these a much lighter grey so any misalignment won't matter so much.
For the odd pages the clearance left by the inner rectangle will need to be about 1cm on the left side of both, for the even pages, the smaller rectangle will be offset the other way, with about 1cm on the right.
Save the doc with rectangles to the left as "Odd" and save the doc with them to the top right as "Even." These are your templates. 1/2 cont'd >
2/2
DeleteIn Word at least, it's possible to set any image file, even a TIFF, as the background of any drawing object, so if your pages are image files, drop them in, if not add the text you copied, and reformat font sizes etc.
Start with the odd numbers, and referring to your manually numbered cheatsheet above, place the image or text in the smaller inner rectangles and once done, save each doc with its two Filofax Personal shaped pages as 1 - 3, 5 - 7 in their own folder named Odd.
Make a matching document with these empty Personal page outlines aligned top right (your "Even" template), and then repeat the process for the even numbers, saving those to a folder named Even.
You now have two folders, each with 22 numbered Filofax pages, 2-up on A4 documents.
Start by printing one each of Odd & Even on both sides of the same sheet of paper to check it's all working, my printer asks for confirmation when working with anything aligned to the edge of a document, then just work through all 11 sheets of paper (44 Filofax sides), again referring to your hand-written cheatsheet.
This doesn't use duplex printing and requires a considerable degree of faff, but once those 22 documents are made you can print unlimited copies, including singles if one page gets damaged.
It also means you have an infinitely re-usable template of odd and even pages, for any other Filofax double-sided prints.
Abutting the Filofax-shaped oblong to the top corner reduces risk of misalignment when you print the back, as does feeding them through one at a time, I've had duplex prints ruined when my printer grabbed two pages and partially printed across the join. It also means the top edge will be nice and crisp, and also means you only have to make three single cuts.
However as mentioned I DO have quite a high tolerance for manually formatting things, and while it gets me some very nice results, it definitely won't suit everyone!
There may also be a much easier way I've completely missed.
PaulB after all that I did successfully use custom sized paper to create a booklet which also contained automatic side margins at the crease which are large enough to be hole-punched, however it had excessive top and bottom margins, I've added a reply to the current Friday FFA No 805.
DeleteI’ve never been able to successfully print multiple pages onto one page. My printer always gets the margins wrong. For many years I’ve found that printing directly onto A5 and Personal paper works well. The only page size I’ve found tricky is Pocket where I print into A6 and trim.
ReplyDelete