Printing 5.5x8.5" 2-up

I am assuming you mean a software to do the manuals. I was thinking you could check out Apple's Pages app in iWork which might suit your needs. It's simple and user friendly. http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/

kufford said:

Hi,

I'm printing user manuals for my company. We use 5.5x8.5" manuals and would like to print them 2-up at a time so that one cut with the guillotine creates two copies. Unfortunately, I can't find anything to do this. It seems rather trivial but nothing I can find will do it ~ Acrobat, Preview, PDFPen, etc. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ken

Click to expand...

Here's one piece of software...google 'impose 2up' and you may find more.

You could set up the pages in InDesign as 2up...there may even be tools there to add an imposition to an existing InDesign document.

I use imposition at the press or imposition within a prepress workflow suite to take care of things like this normally. I've also used a variable data composition tool to do some imposition, but if imposing is all you're looking to do, it's not the way to go.

EDIT: More simply, you may be able to do this right from the Acrobat print dialog, under Page Sizing & Handling --> Multiple. Changing settings there might let you accomplish what you are looking for.

Let me see if understand. For example you have a 10 page manual. When you go to print the manual you want the 1st page to appear twice on an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper.... each time in a column that is 5.5x8 inches on a piece of paper that is rotated 90º to landscape mode? On the next piece of paper you want the 2nd page of the manual to appear twice in that same column format, etc etc. Is that correct?

First of all... research the two ideas above... they actually seem to know what they are talking about.

However, I have 2 ideas that might also work. Assuming you are working in Pages (other packages will need to adjusted appropriately)

1) Rotate the Letter Sized Paper to landscape. Now create linked text boxes, placed on only the Left (or Right) side of each page. You want to link them so that the text flows from one box into the next - makes future edits and additions much easier. When you are done you will have bunch of pages with text on only one side. When you print, print normally. Then flip the pile of printed pages 90º and print again to put the manual on the other (unprinted) side. Two 'gotchas' to watch out for. One... leave a healthy 'gutter' - that is, the gap between the two columns - so that you can cut without chopping the leading or trailing characters off. Two... make sure that your printer prints first page to last page on one pass, then last page to first page on the other pass to prevent the pages being in reverse order.

2) Better yet.... set up the linked text boxes as above... but then do it again on the 2nd half of the page. That is, you will have two identical sets of linked text boxes on each page. Create the manual in the 1st set of text boxes, then do a Select All, and Paste into the 2nd set of text boxes. Now you can just print normally.

Or - play with the Printer Driver. There are settings in there for "layout" and other things that might help.

I agree with the above poster that Creative Suite's InDesign is the way to go ... IF you have it available. I've done quite a few publications using InDesign for layout. It's amazing, but expensive - and dependent on other CS applications.