booklet printing

[floortester]

I have tried to print a booklet of double sided 2 up A5 on A4 booklet, I produced a trial document with a large page number on the sheet and tried all the various options.

The print option offered does not match the layout on the HELP file, and what ever option you choose, printing via a PDF printer, the first page is printed on its own on a A4 sheet, page 2 is on the right and the rest is a jumble,

it is blindingly obvious that nobody in Infinity has ever tried the system, it only works if you use a pair of scissors. When printing a booklet of sections of 4 pages outputting as PDF,  page 1 and the last page are on one side of a sheet, page 2 and the next to last are on the next and so on. I will continue to use Microsoft publisher, even though it is some 5 years out of date as it knows how to print.

TEST04.pdf

[AlanPickup]

The sample pdf has 10 pages, whihc you cannot fit on to 2 sheets of A4 what ever program you use. Start with A5 pages and in the print dialogue use as below

test.afpub test.pdf

[Smee Again]

Why try to reinvent the wheel? There is an A4 template that you can download for free entitled "occy-designs-cookbook_a4-aftemplate" which should get you on the road to where you want to be.

On the upper right of the publisher UI there is a little green outline of a person. When you mouse over it it says "My Account".  Click there and avail yourself of the free templates. Should be able to customize it to fit your needs.

Edit: One more thing . . . why print to a PDF printer? Export as a PDF first. Then, if you still want to print to PDF, things should work as the export should be correct.

[fde101]

15 hours ago, Smee Again said:

why print to a PDF printer?

Most likely because for some inexplicable reason Serif decided to omit their imposition functionality when exporting.  It is only available when printing.

This additionally has the rather unfortunate side-effect of also preventing the imposition functionality from working if you need to export in CMYK, as they also only provide printing in RGB.

In short, if you need CMYK output, you need to use a separate imposition tool, even if the internal functionality would otherwise cover it.

If RGB output is OK and the limited set of options provided within the software meets your requirements, you can print to a PDF, either through the convenient "PDF" button on the Mac print dialog, or through a PDF printer on that other platform (as pictured in the OP).

[Smee Again]

I am interested in this post as I do produce catalogs for one of my customers, and was thinking of making a pocket sized version for the current iteration. Currently, the end user downloads the catalog from her website and prints it for themselves. Has worked great for full size sheets, but this post has caught my attention.

When I look at your PDF (from the original post) in Adobe Acrobat Reader, I don't detect any differences in page size as I scroll through. Does it not show up except while actually printing?

[loukash]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

This additionally has the rather unfortunate side-effect of also preventing the imposition functionality from working if you need to export in CMYK, as they also only provide printing in RGB.

In short, if you need CMYK output, you need to use a separate imposition tool, even if the internal functionality would otherwise cover it.

Works on Mac.
If you need quick'n'dirty imposition with bleed and marks of, say, A4 pages:

1. create a custom paper size like DIN B3 (can be done in any Mac app which is highly recommended if you want to avoid APu crash)
2. select it as paper size in Print dialog
3. select Booklet
4. enable Bleed & Marks
5. PDF popup menu > Save as PDF
6. pray that Publisher doesn't crash before the export is finished

MacOS even provides a rudimentary PDF/X-3 filter. Needs to be activated manually via ColorSync Uitility to be available in Print dialogs.

[ianhg]

I have been having issues printing a brochure from a pdf file created in Affinity Publisher. I was sure that the problem lay with either my iMac or Printer. So the solution I came up with was to Export from Affinity Publisher as for Printing > Pages (option not spreads) . I had already downloaded this bit of script from this website  and followed the instructions all worked OK  https://statusq.org/archives/2019/01/11/8893/

Hope this will help anyone with the same issue using an iMac or Macbook 

Note you do not choose booklet option from printer as the above script will have produced the pages into booklet format for you.

[lmkt]

Does anyone know of a similar website with instructions for a PC?

[Adam_D]

I recently had to figure out how to prepare a booklet pdf for professional printing, and in Windows ohmygorsh it is a pain the neck! 

With the bleed and crop marks, the paper size I needed to export to was non-standard (442mm x 319mm). However, with the print-to-pdf function you are stuck with only the paper sizes available in the Windows default paper options. It doesn't matter if I specify a custom paper size in Affinity Publisher, it won't work and weird cropping business happens and the back page doesn't display next to the front page as it should.  It's just useless. 

What needed to happen was I needed to determine exactly how big my paper size needed to be to accommodate my printer bleed and crop marks, and then generate a new default paper size in Windows. This involves digging into the Registry (which I hate doing) and identifying a system file which you need to backup and then edit in notepad, being mindful to run notepad as an administrator. But to you also need to convert your mm units by multiplying by 1,800 for some reason ... then you need to make another edit in a part of the windows system settings that I've never accessed before, except this time you use typical metric units. 

I got it wrong about 10 times before I got it quite right. But now I can prepare my booklet for the printer properly. 

For anyone else needing the nitty gritty details, here's the info about how you add a new custom paper size for Windows:

https://franklinheath.co.uk/2015/08/29/custom-page-sizes-for-microsoft-print-to-pdf/ 

and a video demonstrating it:

 

[Old Bruce]

Why not use the export options in Publisher?

1 hour ago, Adam_D said:

I recently had to figure out how to prepare a booklet pdf for professional printing, and in Windows ohmygorsh it is a pain the neck! 

...

 

[Adam_D]

19 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Why not use the export options in Publisher?

 

I need to prepare a booklet. The standard export options do not provide for booklet, only the 'print to pdf' function. My client is making a lot of revisions to this document so it's quite crucial that I can remain flexible with my pages and their ordering and then export to a file where the pages are in the printer spread for a booklet - I'm not about to manually generate the crop marks and bleed/margins and such. Affinity can and should do that work for me - it simply doesn't play nicely with Windows for non-standard paper sizes.

On a Mac I don't think there's any issue here. If you need to export to a non-standard size paper, you simply set the paper size in the Affinity print dialog. However, in Windows, you're only able to 'print to pdf' using Microsoft's default page sizes