Book Layout (Word XP)

[Ruff_Hi]

Hi All - I have a book that runs to about 140 pages. I was hoping to be able to print it out in a format so that I can bind it - something like printing two A5 pages landscape on a A4 page double sided, collecting (say) 10 physical pages together, folding them in half and having a small section that looks like a book. If I do this with enough sections, I'll get a stack of sections that I can bind.

I would get 4 notional pages per 1 physical page - this terminology is going to get confusing so I will call a notional page of the book a page and a physical page a sheet (of paper).

Ok, so, I have 4 pages per sheet. If I collect 10 sheets together, that is the first 40 pages of the book. I think I want page 1 and page 40 on the same side of one sheet and page 2 and page 39 on the other side of that same sheet. And so on and so on. Does anyone have a macro (or similar) that will let me do this? Or does microsoft automatically include a "print as book" option somewhere? <img src=/S/bullseye.gif border=0 alt=bullseye width=45 height=15>

[jscher2000]

In the lower right of Word 2002's print dialog are some options that seem to be designed to aid in book printing, but I don't know exactly how they work. To test, I suggest printing to PDF (spare the trees <img src=/S/wink.gif border=0 alt=wink width=15 height=15> ) and see what kind of results you get.

[lind]

On the Page setup screen, there's a section called Pages, and under it Multiple Pages. For Multiple pages, choose book fold, and another box appears for sheets per booklet. IF there's a Word setting to do what you want, I think this is probably it. You probably still have to fiddle with it and possibly the Paper tab also, but this might do what you need. Also you would need to stick with a number of pages that's a multiple of 8.

I hope that is some help, even if I left out all the hard parts. "Fiddle" covers so much ground, doesn't it? <img src=/S/shrug.gif border=0 alt=shrug width=39 height=15>

Lin

[bewens]

Another option is to see if your printer can do what you need. The printers at my office are quite snazzy and can print up to 16 pages on a single sheet (32 if you double-side it). It may not be an option for you, but I thought I'd bring it up, just in case.

Becky

[Ruff_Hi]

This is what I did. Following Lin's suggestion, I located the pages feature under page layout and selected 24. This reformatted my whole document a lot but I was happy with that. I inserted a section break after the first page and then told word to print the first 24 pages ("-24" in the print pages option). It actually printed 48 pages (24 sheets) because I had two page 1s (1 in the first section and 1 in the second). Went back to word and asked it to print the first 23 ("-23"). That worked like a dream.

Lucky I had printed to PDF ( <img src=/S/thumbup.gif border=0 alt=thumbup width=15 height=15> JS) so i didn't waste paper. Unluckily, my printer couldn't do duplex. Not to worry the photocopier can. Ran it through the photocopier to get my mini book and ... <img src=/S/bwaaah.gif border=0 alt=bwaaah width=123 height=15> ... it copied the second page upside down. Double sided works if you rotate the page top to bottom to look at the second page but the book option needs it rotated side to side to look at the second page - anyone know how to change that <img src=/S/question.gif border=0 alt=question width=15 height=15>

SO, I took my original 24 pages and inverted every second page, ran that stack thru the copier and "bobs your uncle" it worked out perfectly.

Thanks all for your help.

[Andrew Lockton]

If you feed your originals into the copier 'short side first' instead of 'long side first' AND use either the A4R tray (A4 rotated) or the manual feed tray then you wont need to rotate every second page.

[Ruff_Hi]

Thx Andrew - I will certainly try that.