How do I print half-letter-size pages on letter-size printer?

Factual Questions
1

I know what the intended output is, but I don’t know how to obtain it, what setting in what dialog would make it happen…

I have a 300 page document. After it is printed and collated, I want each page to be 5.5 inches tall by 4.25" wide, which is 1/2 of letter size, and printed double-sized. Staples says they are equipped to print onto letter size only (perhaps also legal but let’s ignore that for now, the point being that they aren’t equipped with reams of 4.25 x 5.5 nor does it have a paper tray for same); what they do have is an industrial paper cutter that can sever a ream or more of 8.5 x 11 to whatever smaller size is needed, after printing.

WHAT I VISUALIZE HAPPENING is that I print in two columns landscape, double sided, in such a way that the column on the back side of the left side of the first piece of paper is Page 1, the left column on the front side is Page 2, the right column on the front side is Page 299, and the column on the back side of the right side is Page 300. The second piece of paper to fall into the printer tray would have Page 3, 4, 297, and 298, and so on. The Staples employee picks up the stack of paper over to the paper cutter and whacks it neatly in two right down the middle, then takes the sheaf of halfsize pages on the left and flips them over and I’ve got 300 halfsize pages printed double-sided in the correct order, no waste.

WHAT THE STAPLES EMPLOYEE DESCRIBED INSTEAD was that I print double-sided, half-sized, onto 8.5 x 11 paper; 150 sheets of printed paper end up in the tray with the printed part all occupying only the left sides of those pages; the first piece of paper to land in the tray contains pages 1 and 2, then next one has pages 3 and 4, and so on, conventional non-problematic double-sided printing. They whack the sheaf of paper in half, discard the empty right half, and hand me my document, 300 pages of 4.25 x 5.5 printed double-sided. Embarrassingly, I’m a little unclear on how to set that up either. Do I tell Page Setup to print to 8.5 x 11 at 50%, landscape? Do I tell it to print to 4.25 x 5.5, portrait? By the way, the usual procedure is that I print the Word document to PDF then take in the PDF which they open and print… Adobe Acrobat being what it is, if it is told to print a 4.25 x 5.5 document to a printer with Acrobat page setup of 8.5 x 11, I’m pretty sure it will obligingly send the print job resized to fit the output size, thus resizing it back to 8.5 x 11… so my guess would be that I set MS Word’s Print Setup to 8.5 x 11 and size it to 50% and print landscape, yielding Acrobat pages where the right half of each document is blank, yes? But if they print that document double-sided, won’t Page 1 print the shrunken page-image on the left size and on the flip side Page 2 will have the shrunken page-image also on the left side, which is to say on the immediate backside of the blank area of the front, with its own blank area being immediately behind the obverse side’s printed area?

Besides, I like scenario 1 better because it’s less wasteful. There must be a name for that kind of formatting, it’s not like I invented it cleverly on my own or anything. Is there a setting either in MS Word proper or in Apple’s MacOS Page Setup for laserprinters pertaining to print jobs in general that outputs print jobs as two columns arrayed side by side in landscape with pagination as I described?

2

Before the actual answers start coming in, I’m going to point out that 4.25 X 5.5 is actually one quarter size, not half size.

3

I have Microsoft Word 2013 and in that, you would go to Print and from the options select the one for “2 pages per sheet”. You might also want to choose print double-sided.

4

(This is the conceptual paragraph.) Fold a sheet of paper into quarters. Top and bottom edges together first, then left to right edges. Orient it so the free corners are at the upper right. Now you have a little eight-page booklet that you can read like a pamphlet, IF you slit the fold at the bottom, see?

Now, set up your first eight pages so each one will fit into a 5.5 X 4.24 page. On your first pass, print page 8 on the left, 1 on the right on one side an 2,7 on the other side. You’re still only using the top half of the sheet, so turn the paper upside down in the feeder tray, and print 4, 5 and 6, 3.

Fold the result as described in the first paragraph above, and you’ve got eight pages of what you described, and you didn’t have to discard anything.

Repeat this throughout the entire document, and you can finish the job using 38 sheets of 8.5 X 11 paper.

5

P. S. At this size, binding may turn out to be an issue. Also, the print may be a bit smallish for comfortable reading.

6

Print->Layout->pages per sheet.

7

As far as I can see, what you want is a booklet. My wife frequently prints them and we had no end of trouble with Word. What we do now is to type it up as a standard A4 document in Word and save it as a PDF. Then we use the PDF ‘booklet’ setting to print and collate the pages. It needs some fiddling around with font sizes and pictures within text can be tricky, but it works a treat. I recently printed my daughter’s wedding service sheets this way and it looked quite professional.

8

Shoulda proofread. And I suck at arithmetical operations.

a) As kaylasdad points out in post#2, 4.25 x 5.5 would be a quarter sheet not a half sheet. As neither he nor anyone else magically intuited, what I want really is a half sheet. which would be 5.5 x 8.5 not 4.25 x 5.5.

b) Dewey Finn and beowulff thanks…but when I specify 2 pages per sheet, though, it prints page 1 on the left side and page 2 on the right side of the first piece of paper; it then goes on to print pages 3 and 4 on the second sheet of paper. I don’t have a printer handy that supports double-sided printing as Staples does but it appears that what I’d get at Staples would be pages 1 and 2 backed by pages 3 and 4. That won’t work.

Let’s go through this again. When I finish up the print job, the Staples employee should walk over to the output tray and the topmost sheet (i.e., last page printed) should have page 150 on the left, 151 on the right; on the underside it would have page 149 in back of 150 and 152 in back of 151. The sheet directly below that one would have page 148 on the left and page 153 on the right; on the reverse side would be pages 147 and 154, respectively. At the bottom of the stack, (the first page printed), there should be pages 2 and 299 backed by pages 1 and 300.
Staples employee would then pick up the stack and carry it over to the guillotine-thingie and whack it right down the middle. Then would pick up the half-sized stack on the left and flip it over onto the half-sized stack on the right so that page 150 lays down on top of page 151. See how that works? All the pages are in order. If I did what DeweyFinn or beowulff pointed me to, I can’t print double-sided; the wrong pages will end up on the backsides. (Unless I’m missing an implied step here).
c) I should mention that I own copies of Quark XPress. I could do this in Quark if Quark knows how and Word does not (and MacOS built-in generic Laser Printer options don’t include it as a built-in option for any & all print jobs etc). But although I own Quark I am not an experienced Quark user. I have Quark only because I was once tasked with getting FileMaker to execute AppleScripts that would create Quark documents automatically based on field params in the database. So if the answer is “do it in Quark” I once again would need instructions.

9

Print 2 copies, non-collated. Then both the right & left sides of the paper will have a full copy. No wasted paper.

P.S. Why are you doing this?
A half-page size document, but 300 pages thick, would be seriously unwieldy. Hardly a ‘pamphlet’ at all! If you have that much to print, use full size pages.

10

The search term you are looking for is “Imposition.”

11

That would be the first option, how I wanted to do it myself. But (as described at fairly great length) the issue with having pages print on both sides (left and right) as well as both surfaces (front and back) is that one would want an appropriate page to be on the respective sides after they are chopped down the middle.

A 300 page book in which each page is 8.5 x 11 is a bit unweildy to tote around. A 300 page book in which each page is half that size is considerably less so. It’s not a pamphlet.

Thanks! ** goes off to research how to do “imposition” **

12

Does your source material have any pictures? If not, just reduce the font and print it double-sided on about 60-70 sheets of paper. Staples will be able to turn them into a coil-bound notebook. Taking more than 20 sheets of paper, folding them in half and stapling them together is a real pain. You will need to trim the outer margins and it will not look good.

If you absolutely cannot reformat,
MS Word 2013 >> Print >> Page Setup >> Margins >> Multiple pages: set to Book fold
Most PDF viewers have bookfold/booklet setting under Print Setup >> Page Scaling
and split the document into 20 page sections, print and fold each separately and then have them bound into one notebook.

13

I did not follow your post, AdamF, and it appears to be reciprocal. I think you missed the part about how Staples would simply CHOP the pile of paper in half with a great big paper-cutter. No folding is involved.

My version of Word self-identifies as “Microsoft Word for Mac 2011” aka Version 14.2.0; it has no mention of either “Multiple pages” or of “book fold” in the Margins dialog of the Microsoft Word subdialog of the Page Setup subdialog of the Print dialog.

Even if it did have, I don’t understand the logic here as it addresses the questions I had. I want the physical end result to be half the size of an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. Reducing the font won’t make the printable region size smaller, it just crams more words onto an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.

14

Forgive me if I’m 30 years behind the times. If so, somebody please update my ignorance. //old-rolleyes//

Is this the sort of feature that some printers (perhaps the higher-end ones) would be able to do and others might not? Or is this the sort of stuff that modern systems do in the printer driver code in your computer, then sending the final results as-they-are-to-be-printed to the printer?

I worked for a laser printer company (Imagen, long-since defunct) 1984-1987, an era when laser printers were new-fangled golly-whiz devices. When you responded to personal ads (which were printed in newspapers in those days) via U. S. Mail (which is how it was done in those days), you could always make a slick first impression if you sent a letter printed in near-typeset-quality on a laser printer! (“You only love me for my printer!” Yeah, I really used that line.)

Even then, our own printers could do this, without needing any special drivers in the computer. These were plain-old-DOS days, and all a printer driver really needed to do was send plain-old-plain-text to the printer byte by byte. The printer itself could spool up hundreds of pages, and was capable of printing them in the order received (for printer models that stacked the pages face-down) or reverse the order (for printer models that stacked the pages face-up). It could do double-sided printing on some models – the most efficient way was to print the front sides of a bunch of pages (I think we did 10 or 20), then the back sides of those in reverse order. The printer itself took care of printing them all in the right sequence so the end result came out right.

There was an option to print plain-text at half size (you got two pages printed on one sheet, in half-size text. You held the page in landscape orientation, but the two printed pages on the left and right halves of the page were each in portrait orientation.

And yes, it could print booklets on various paper sizes. It did either quarto or octavo (or both? I forget which), which entailed printing the individual pages, two pages per paper side, both front and back, in some crazy-ass order so you could fold the resulting pages in half to make a booklet. The computer didn’t have to deal with any of this – it just sent the pages of the text in sequential order, and the printer itself took care of printing the pages in whatever crazy-ass order it took to get it right.

So how is that all handled in modern systems? My impression is that printers have gotten dumber and dumber, to the point where all they can do anymore is print bitmaps, and the driver in the computer has to do all the layout and formatting, even to the extent of rasterizing all the text and sending bitmaps to the printer. Some printers still advertise “Does text printing!”

SO: Is the OP asking about printer features that any modern printer actually can do, or is he asking about “printer features” that are actually handled entirely in a modern printer driver?

15

(Missed edit winder.)

ETA: Our physical printers could physically move anywhere from 8 to 20 pages per minute (depending on the model), and our firmware could run those printers at full speed, at a time when the best our competitors could do was 4 or 5 pages per minute. We had a prototype that could physically move NINETY pages per minute. But gosh darn, our firmware could only keep up with a paltry 60 pages per minute. FAIL! But the “market” only wanted 4-PPM printers, so that’s what sold, and ours fell by the wayside.

16

With the exception of beowulff I’m not sure anyone is following me here.

Let’s try an illustration. Click linky, please. Note that each physical piece of paper starts off with four pages printed on it: two on the front of each 8.5 x 11 piece of paper and two on the back as well because we’re utilizing double-sided printing. Note also that after the print job is done, the Staples employee is going to CHOP the stack right down the middle, resulting in twice as many piece of paper at half the original size, each now containing two pages (one on the front and one on the back).

The complicated part is getting the correct sequence of pages. Linked illustration should help clarify that. beowulff informs me (and subsequent searches confirm) that this overall process is called “imposition”. So what I’m trying to find is how to do imposition, either in Word, in the native MacOS print or page setup dialogs that apply to anything you do on a laser printer, or in QuarkXpress (4.1, MacOS 9 version, I’m afraid).

17

Do your pages 2 up. Two page 1’s on one side, two page 2’s on the other, etc. Then chop the stack in half. No wasted paper.

18

Oh - before I retired I misspent my working life in print shops. :slight_smile: My suggestion assumed you were sending your document to a printer and not setting it up for a printing press. The method requires no collating or pagination if you’re sending your entire document directly to a printer.

19

??

So I end up with two copies of the book when I’m done?

Yeah, I guess that would work…

ETA: I would be walking into Staples with the document on disk. You saying they should be able to “just do it” without further assistance from me, I just tell them to make it happen? They aren’t a “printing press”. I suppose they would qualify as “a printer” in some sense of the word?

20

Oh - what you described is quarter size as kayla’s dad pointed out. If this is the case, do them 4-up.