For printing an A5 document, how should I be laying out pages?

[bobdobbs]

Sorry - this is probably a very noob question.
I don't know anything about commercial print, and I'm new to print design. So I'm not sure how to think about this.

In summary, I'm wondering how I should be laying pages out across a multi-page document.

Details:
I'm creating a small (8 pages) booklet at A5 size.

I've been creating the pages in order within Publisher: the first page is the cover, the second page is 'page 1', and from there I do pages 2,3,4 etc.

My home printer does not do double-sided printing.

At home I will do print the document in order to test things.
The pages are printed in the same way that I've layed out the document within publisher.
So the second A5 sheet that gets printed contains pages 2 and 3.

For some things in my test, this is fine. I get to eyeball the font size, images, page layout and so on.
Of course I can't really assembled the document without cutting up the pages.

But makes me wonder about what happens when I send the document to a commercial printer.

If I send the document as-is (pages layed out in linear order) to a commercial printer, then does a commercial print process simply re-order the pages automatically in the sane order, so that the physical document can be stitched together without problems?

Or is it my responsibility to lay out the document within whichever desktop publishing software that I'm using so that their process can print in order...

... implying that on my end I'll be laying out the pages in Publisher in a way that isn't linear?

 

[PaulEC]

Rearranging pages in printing order, rather than reading order, is known as imposition. Most (if not all) commercial printers will  do this themselves. If you want to print the booklets yourself use the booklet setting in the print dialogue. The exact way you print booklets will depend on your printer. On printers which do not automatically do double sided printing it will be necessary to manually turn the paper over half way through the printing.

[Catshill]

I find the easiest and most reliable way to do this is to export to PDF and then use the booklet option to print from the pdf reader.