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Can someone recommend an easy way to convert a PDF file into a quarter page booklet? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago by CanadianCabbage@lemmy.ca to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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I'd like to have each page a 1/4 the size of a regular piece of paper, in a booklet style, printing on the front and back, and have 4 pages per page one side of piece of paper.

That way I can cut the page in half and minimize the amount of paper I use while making a quarter page size booklet I can keep in my pocket.

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[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't know about other browsers, but Firefox's print dialog offers the option to fit multiple pages onto a single sheet natively. You can just print to PDF (or paper directly) in that manner.

Do you plan on cutting up all your quarter sheets and rebinding them? Because if you are expecting to fold the printouts as-is and have the pages in the correct order, you'll need a slightly more clever solution.

Apropos of nothing, Inkscape (free, open source) does a very competent job these days of importing .pdf's, at which point you can scale, rearrange, or otherwise edit them however you see fit. This will be tedious, but will allow you to do basically anything you want with the content.

[–] CanadianCabbage@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am looking for the latter. It seems to be a common question but I can't really seem to find a one stop answer.

I feel like it will be a bit of a challenge to arrange around 100 pages to work with this

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

LibreOffice Writer (and Draw, which can load .pdfs) have the option to change the page order when you are printing multiple pages scaled onto one sheet. They also have a "brochure" print setting which automatically half sizes a document to fit four pages on one sheet, two on each side, correctly reordered for you to fold it in the middle. Would that work?

[–] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago

When you said "regular" piece of paper, are you talking about A4 or letter size ?

If you are using A4 the answer is quite easy, get a pack of A5 paper and print on it using the book mode of it printer. It will automatically organize the sheets in the right order. Then with a stapler you can attach them all together.

If you are using the American standard ... Good luck.

[–] Death_Equity@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Depends on your PDF viewer, but there is a print option to print 4 pages on one page. You will have to consider the print order to have front and back.

[–] CanadianCabbage@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's the issue I'm running into. Once you select 4 pages per sheet it seems to override the booklet mode.

Adobe seems to try to print

1 2

3 4

for example. The only option I can think of is to arrange the pages to work with this but it gets a bit difficult with nearly 100 pages.

[–] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

Lay the page order out in Excel (might be a nice puzzle in itself), concatenate into a single comma separated string, and feed that into the "what pages to print" print dialog field?

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Save it to an e-reader.

[–] AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would just go to a cheap print shop like Fedex or Office Max and tell them to do it for you.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Also you can (usually) request a certain paper thickness that can make turning the tiny pages a little easier. I once got a quote for a textbook pdf and they accidentally told me the price for B&W but they honored it in color.