Then when you run the script, it will create a folder called ‘booklet-pages’ on your desktop. The script will warn you if your page count isn’t right. Select the last page and choose ‘Edit > Insert > Blank Page’ as often as needed and then save. Fortunately, you can easily append blank pages in Preview if needed. (Note too that if you’re reading this in 2022 or later, you definitely want to continue on to read the updates at the bottom of the post!)įirst, the number of pages in your starting PDF must be a multiple of 4. It does, however, have a few useful ways of manipulating PDFs without having to install anything else, and my script will at least prompt you with some of the following information when you run it. Now, please note: You should understand how this works before trying it! It’s not complex, and I could have made it much prettier and self-explanatory, but I was using Automator, which is so far from a real programming language as to be frustrating.

Set the ‘Two-Sided’ option to ‘Short-Edge Binding’.

Go into the Layout section of the Print dialog.

You can then just print that using Preview as follows: It produces a new PDF on your Desktop with appropriately shuffled pages.

It’s an Automator script which you can run as a service: once installed, you can right-click on a PDF and select Services, and you should find a ‘Make Booklet PDF’ option. So here’s my solution, which could be a lot tidier, but does the only tricky bit of the job: getting the pages in the right order. Now, there are utilities you can buy which can do exactly this, but why would I spend a tenner or two when I could instead use a few otherwise lucrative working hours and build one myself? My HP printer driver had a ‘booklet’ facility, and it worked OK for 8 pages, but let me down when given any more. Unfortunately, you need to print page 39 on the same page as page 10, and then pages 40 and 9 on the other side, etc, and when you get to anything more than about 4 pages it’s hard and tedious to do this by hand and get it right. I had a 47-page PDF document that I wanted to turn into a compact A5 booklet – you know, one of those things where you get out the big stapler and make something like this:

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