How can I decrease PDF's margine while printing?

Question

I have an e-book(for A4 size-portrait) with border and margin of about 2 cm. Since the fonts are a bit big, I want to print two pages on same side of A4 paper(in landscape) and zoom a bit by decreasing the margin. 2 cm of margin on a side while printing a page on one side means 4 cm of margin on the middle and 2 cm on the each left and right side when two pages are printed in 1 page layout before scaling(though after scaling there is no four cm margin in the middle and 2 on each side but you can see the ratio is same) and that would awful waste of space in the middle. Can I also decrease margin only on left and leave as it is on right so i can bind it?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

One way to accomplish this is to use Acrobat to crop the pages. You would open the page boxes tool, and crop as you wish. You have the option to apply the cropping to odd or even pages.

In the next step, you print, and in the print dialog, you have the option to print multiple pages per sheet.

Printing multiple copies per sheet option is also available in Reader; cropping is not, however.

Answer 2

In my Windows days, I had to do a lot of printing with format translation (multiple pages to one, booklets, organizer pages, etc.). I used a commercial product called Clickbook. It runs about $50 (although there's a free trial if you have just a single task), so you would have to decide if it's worth the investment.

It works somewhat like a printer driver in that you select it as the printer and then print your document. It collects all of the output pages and then opens an app where you get an endless list of output formats and organizations (and you can define your own or modify the canned ones). It then automatically resizes, re-orients, and resequences the pages for the output arrangement you want. Things like margins and binding space are optimized by the program's algorithms, or you can adjust them.

It might be overkill for what you need. I found it really useful for a wide range of requirements. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in Linux.