Booklet printing

Question

How would I print a booklet in Word 2016? Do I have to do 4, 1 then 2, 3 or is the order printed automatically as some people have said. I am doing it for my project and I am making a book so will I have to rearrange the pages 4,1 2,3 after i have done book-fold option in Word 2016 so that the reader will read it in correct order or not? Plus how do I add a gap in the middle of my page for book binding? I am going to try printing it normally without doing any page order changes and have not tried anything as of now.

Answer 1

So this process is called imposing and you are asking about printer spreads. What we usually look at when making a document is called reading order or reader spreads.

For any booklet with more than 8 or 12 pages, you are probably going to want to use reader spreads and have software handle the page ordering for you, since it gets kind of overwhelming.

Usually you are going to want to set the page size of the document the trim size (that is: the final size of the book), and then when you impose & print, the pages get printed 2-up, double sided on sheets that are the same height and twice as wide as the trim size. Double sided printing on consumer printers is called duplexing.

An additional consideration is creep which is an alignment adjustment made to account for the thickness of the paper: the inner sheets will stick out farther because the spine gets thicker as you stack pages.

Exactly how you get this done varies wildly depending on software. I usually rely on my print provider to do this for business, but for home projects, the simplest is to print or export to PDF, and the run the PDF through open source PDF-to-booklet software.

A few tips:

1) saddle stitch (fold and staple) booklets need to have page counts in exact multiples of 4: you are printing 2-up double sided and then folding in half. A single page (half sheet) will fall out of the book.

2) in keeping with #1, if you need to work out page order for a 16 page booklet, take 4 sheets of paper, stack them, fold them in half, and then take a marker and write "1,2,3..." in reading order. When you remove the sheets, you will see the required layout of the pages.

3) google using the bolded terms above. One of the main differences you may find in page ordering is for perfect bound books: for perfect bound you break up the book into mini-booklets called signatures and then stack them. See also: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/search?q=booklet