N-Up and Booklet Printing Explained

Printing two pages on one sheet saves paper. Printing a small booklet means putting pages in an order that looks wrong until it is folded. Both are called imposition: arranging pages on a sheet for printing and finishing. This guide explains how they work, so that you can check the result of any tool before you print a hundred copies.

N-up: several pages on one sheet

N-up places N pages per sheet in reading order: 2-up puts page 1 and 2 on the first sheet, 3 and 4 on the second. Common choices are 2, 4, 6, 9 and 16. Two portrait pages sit best side by side on a landscape sheet; two landscape pages sit best stacked on a portrait sheet. Each page is scaled down to fit its cell, so text becomes smaller as N grows: 4-up shrinks each page to about half its size. Margins and the gutter between pages take space from the cells.

The PDF N-Up & Booklet Maker chooses the grid direction and sheet orientation that make the pages largest, and shows the cell size and the number of sheets.

Booklets: why four pages per sheet

A sheet of paper has two sides and is folded once, so it makes four pages of the finished booklet. The number of pages must therefore be a multiple of 4. If the document has 6 pages, two blank pages are added, usually at the end, to make 8; the booklet then uses 2 sheets.

For a booklet of n pages (n a multiple of 4), the first sheet carries the last page and the first page on the front, left to right, and pages 2 and n-1 on the back. The next sheet carries n-2 and 3, then 4 and n-3, and so on towards the middle. For 8 pages the four printed sides are 8 | 1, 2 | 7, 6 | 3 and 4 | 5. When the sheets are stacked, folded in half and stapled on the fold, the pages read 1, 2, 3 … 8.

Duplex settings

• Booklet sides are landscape, so the long side of the sheet is the top. Print on both sides and choose flip on the short edge. Printers label this differently ("short-edge binding", "flip on short edge"), which is why a test copy matters.
• If the back side comes out upside down, the flip setting is wrong; switch to the other option.
• Print at actual size or 100%, not "fit to page", otherwise scaling is applied twice.

Right-to-left booklets

Scripts that read right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, bind on the right. The imposition mirrors: the first page of the booklet sits on the right of the first sheet\'s front. A good tool offers this as an option.

Creep and other limits

When a thick booklet is folded, the inner pages stick out further than the outer ones, so the margins of inner pages shift. Commercial imposition software compensates for this ("creep"); simple tools do not. For a booklet of up to about 20 pages this is usually invisible; for thick ones, leave generous margins. Bleed, trim marks and colour management belong to professional prepress, not to office printing; if you need bleed, start with the PDF Bleed Adder, and see its limits.

Prepare the PDF first

• Make all pages the same size before imposing; resize the pages if they differ.
• Remove empty pages that you do not want in the middle with Remove Blank Pages.
• Check fonts with the PDF Font Checker if the file goes to a printer.
• For a black-and-white print run, convert first with PDF to Grayscale / Black & White and look at the result.

Whatever you do, print one booklet and flip through it before printing the run.