How to make a booklet from a PDF
- Drop the PDF on the box above.
- Choose what your printer can do (see the table below if you are not sure), the paper you will print on and, for Arabic, Hebrew or Japanese, right-hand binding.
- Press Make booklet. The sheet plan shows which pages land on the front and back of each sheet.
- Print at Actual size, not "Fit to page", fold the stack in half and staple on the fold.
Each side of a landscape sheet carries two pages. For an 8-page document the first sheet has pages 8 and 1 on the front and 2 and 7 on the back, the second sheet 6 and 3, then 4 and 5. Folded and nested, they read 1 to 8. The tool works this out for any length and shows the plan before you print.
Which printer setting to choose
Getting this wrong is the usual reason a home-printed booklet has every other page upside down. We checked it with the tool's own output: an 8-page booklet made for one flip setting and printed with the other comes out with 4 of the 8 pages upside down, in either direction.
| Your printer | Choose | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Has "Flip on short edge" in the double-sided settings | Prints both sides — flip on short edge | One PDF. The standard booklet layout. |
| Prints double-sided but only offers "Flip on long edge" | Only flips on the long edge | One PDF with the back of every sheet already turned upside down, so after the printer's flip it reads the right way up. |
| Prints one side only | I turn the paper over | Two PDFs: fronts, then backs. A one-sheet test tells you whether to tick "Backs in reverse order" or "Backs upside down" for your printer. |
The one-sided route matters because printers differ: some stack printed sheets face down, some face up, and they take paper back in different ways. Rather than guessing, the page asks you to print sheet 1's front and back first, and the two tick boxes cover every combination.
Where the blank pages go
A booklet needs a multiple of four pages. A 10-page document becomes 12, and the question is where the two blanks go. Added at the end, they push your last page inside the booklet and the outside back cover is blank paper. By default this tool puts them just before your last page, so a document with a back cover keeps it on the back. Choose "At the very end" if your last page is ordinary text.
How big the pages print
Two pages share one sheet, so on the same paper size each page has to shrink. How much depends on the shape of the paper, and US Letter loses more than A4:
| Pages | Printed on | Page size in print | 11 pt text becomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A4 | A4 | 70.7% (A5), no margins added | 7.8 pt |
| US Letter | US Letter | 64.7%, plus a 0.69 in band at top and bottom | 7.1 pt |
| A5 or half-letter | A4 or Letter | 100% | 11 pt |
| A4 | A3 | 100% | 11 pt |
| US Letter | Tabloid (11 × 17 in) | 100% | 11 pt |
A4 halves into A5 exactly because every A size has the same proportions. Letter does not: half a Letter sheet is 5.5 × 8.5 in, and an 8.5 × 11 in page has to shrink until its width fits, leaving blank bands above and below. If small text matters, choose "Twice the page width" and print on the larger paper, or lay the document out at A5 or half-letter in the first place.
Thick booklets: sections
A single folded stack gets hard to fold flat and staple as it grows, and the inner sheets stick out further at the open edge than the outer ones. For long documents choose Sections: the pages are split into groups of 16, 20, 24 or 32, each group is imposed as its own small booklet, and you fold each one separately and stack them, the way books are bound. Above 40 pages the tool suggests sections of 5 sheets. Blank pages are only added once, at the end of the document, so only the last section can be shorter. There is no automatic shift for the inner sheets (creep); trimming the open edge after stapling evens it out.
What happens to the pages
Pages are not turned into pictures. Each one is placed on the sheet as it is, so text and lines stay sharp and selectable. The tool uses what you see in a PDF viewer: pages turned with the viewer's rotate setting are placed upright, and anything outside a page's visible area (its crop box) stays hidden. Pages of different sizes are each scaled to fit their half. Links and form fields are not carried into the booklet, which is meant for paper.
How we checked it: test documents of 8, 10, 13 and 41 pages, including a rotated page and a page with a crop box, were made into booklets in every printer mode, with both blank placements, right-hand binding and sections. A script then "folded" the output the way paper folds — nesting the sheets and turning the backs over on the short or long edge — and read the page numbers back in order. Every page came out in sequence and upright, and the blanks were where the setting said.
Next steps
If the pages are the wrong size to start with, resize the PDF to A5 or A4 first. To change the order or drop pages before printing, use Reorder PDF Pages or Delete PDF Pages. For a black-and-white print run, PDF to Grayscale keeps the text as text.