Printing a small booklet

If you want to print a little booklet on your own printer; something you can just fold over, and staple yourself, then you don't want InDesign's Print dialog box. Instead, you want to go to the File menu, and choose Print Booklet. When you use Print Booklet, you're doing something called imposition. Imposition is when you rearrange all your document pages to print out in a different order. For example, if you have an 8 page booklet, then you want page 1 and page 8 to print next to each other; not page 1 and 2. If you need to do really complex imposition, like for a printing press, you don't want to use Print Booklet; you want to use professional imposition software.

They usually work on PDF files, and impose them properly. But here we're just working on a small document, Print Booklet is perfect for. Most of these features are irrelevant for the kind of documents we're printing using Print Booklet; things like Creep, or Perfect Bound printing, and so on. We're just going to stick with Saddle Stitch. I'm going to jump right to my Preview pane, and I can see that this document is not going to work on this piece of paper. The white rectangle is the piece of paper, and my pink stuff is the part of my document that's hanging off the side.

So I need to change my print settings in order to make this work. To do that, I'll click the Print Settings button, and up comes the Print dialog box. A lot of stuff is grayed out here, so I don't have to worry about it. The main thing I need to do is go to the Setup pane, and change this to print sideways: Landscape, instead of Portrait. Now, when I click OK, you'll see that it fits on the page, but I see that there's still pink. That means this page, the document page, is too big to fit on this paper. So once again, I go to Print Settings dialog box, the Setup pane, and say Scale this to Fit.

It's going to scale it down to about 75%. Click OK, and now you can see that the document pages will fit on the paper. It's a little bit hard to see here, but you'll notice there is a little 1 on this page, and an 8 on this page. Those are the document page numbers. They don't really print; you're not going to have a big number in the middle of the page. It's just there to indicate that page 1 and 8 are going to be next to each other. I can then scroll through the document, and see that 7 and 2 are next to each other, and then 6 and 3, and finally, 4 and 5 are going to be the inside spread.

When you're ready to print, just click the Print button. But I do want to point out that there's a major limitation of print booklet, and that is, your document must have a number of pages that's divisible by 4. So 4 pages, or 8 pages, or 12, or 16; something like that. And if you fold a piece of paper in half, you can see why. There are only four panels that you can fill. So if you had a five page document, for example, InDesign wouldn't know where to put that fifth page. With that said, Print Booklet is really cool when you're making your own proof print, or printing up a small run of your own booklets.