I have two PDF files, one 166 pages and the other 300 pages, that I’d like to have printed and bound as books. I found several Internet sites that perform this service. However, I’d like to know if anyone here has used such a service and would recommend it. Thanks in advance.
I’ve done it.
First consideration is the page setting used when creating the PDF — 8 1/2 x 11 ? Let’s assume so, but if not tell me so.
So one route is to simply print double-sided then bind the results, both of which you can do easily at Staples or equivalent, but then you end up with a somewhat unweildy 8.5 x 11 inch bound book, and you’d probably prefer something with the form factor of a typical paperback, something you could easily carry in one hand.
The following instructions assume you have or can find a printer driver that Acrobat will let you use to print to PDF. (I’m always on a Mac, where printing to PDF is a native option, except that Acrobat won’t let you use the built-in MacOS printer dialog option of printing to PDF, so I installed a driver called PDFWriter). To clarify, you’re going to be printing your existing PDF to a different PDF.
Select PDFWriter (or your equivalent) as your printer this time.
In Acrobat (or Acrobat Reader’s) print dialog, locate the Booklet button — it’s often just about at the centre of the Print window.
You can make some other adjustments before pressing the Print button.
Print to PDFWriter
If you’re literally using PDFWriter, the output will be in /Users/Shared/PDFWriter; if you’re using a different printer driver, it will either prompt you to pick where to save the PDF or the documentation will tell you where it dumps its output.
Anyway, what you get is two pages to the physical page, printed double-sided, so when you print them out to paper you’ve actually got four pages to the physical page counting front and back, and they’re laid out LIKE THIS:
Print that out at Staples (or equivalent) using the double-sided option. Not on their thickest resume-quality paper, by the way, but on standard bond.
And then you have them whack the pile right down the middle, flip the pile on the left over on top of the pile on the right, and bind it (spiral or otherwise).
Now your page size is 5.5 x 8.5 which is a far less cumbersome size.
If you pay some web site service to print and bind into books, do they not take care of imposition? You just have to set up your PDF with the correct bleed and trim sizes, and margins.
This is why I like to go down to the print shop in person. That way, the printer can print a couple of sample pages and check that everything looks OK.
Yeah, I get in the car and drive to Staples with the pdf on a thumb drive. None of this website service stuff. I want to feel the prospective cover, examine samples of their spiral binding and glued binding and all that.
I got an email from someone in Australia who was complaining that my book was listed at A$175, which he felt was an outrage (yes, it is). I told him to download from my web site, put it on a usb stick, take it to a local copy shop who would print it for him. He did and they printed the title page on a plastic cover and the rest double-sided and spiral bound it for about A$20. He was quite happy.
I don’t understand how to print it at 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 (or A5 paper). PDF copy is not made to be reflowed. I could have recompiled it for that size paper, of course. The original was sized to be convenient for either letter or A4.
It doesn’t reflow it. It prints two pages side by side on THIS side of the paper and also two pages side by side on the OTHER side of the paper for a total of four — then you slice the whole stack down the middle and you’re holding double-sided 5.5 x 8 pages.
You could re-scale the pages [described by @AHunter3 ] . There are plug-ins available for printing multiple logical pages on a physical sheet of paper, but if you know what you are doing I have always had a good experience with a combination of the free scripts “psbook” and “psnup”. Note, you don’t have to slice the whole stack, or even do that much slicing because you can pick an appropriate signature size and fold however many A4 folia in half to form signatures.
If you mean literally reflow the text or recompile the source to optimize the font size, etc. for A5, it’s true that PDF is not designed for that; it’s supposed to be “electronic paper”.
Thanks for all the advice. Looks like my best choice is to use the services of a local print shop.
So you have to reduce the type size by at least 1/3.
The difference between A4 and A5 is \sqrt{2}, so less than 30% ! But, yes, it’s smaller. Moreso than you would have picked if the type size were for an A5 book in the first place.