Printing several PDF pages on one sheet of paper

The short answer

To print multiple pages on one sheet from a PDF, use the "pages per sheet" option in your print dialog, or create an n-up PDF that already has 2, 4 or more pages arranged on each sheet. Two per sheet stays comfortably readable. Four is the practical limit for body text. Nine and above are for thumbnails, not reading.

Printers call this imposition: arranging source pages onto the sheets they will be printed on. There are two common kinds, and they solve different problems.

N-up and booklet order are different layouts

N-up places pages on each sheet in reading order. Pages 1 and 2 go on the first sheet, 3 and 4 on the next, and so on for 2-up; for 4-up, pages 1 to 4 fill the first sheet in a grid. Stack the sheets and they read in sequence. This is what you want for handouts, lecture notes, slide decks and proofing.

Booklet order is built for folding. Sheets are printed on both sides, stacked, folded in half and stapled along the fold, and the pages have to be shuffled so they come out in sequence after folding. For an eight-page booklet on two sheets, the outer sheet carries pages 8 and 1 on its front and 2 and 7 on its back; the inner sheet carries 6 and 3, then 4 and 5. The page count must be a multiple of four, so blank pages are added at the end when it is not.

The two are easily confused because both put two pages side by side on a landscape sheet. Print an ordinary 2-up file as a booklet and the pages come out in the wrong order; print a booklet-ordered file flat and it reads 8, 1, 2, 7. Decide whether the result will be folded before choosing.

How much the type shrinks

Putting two pages on one sheet halves the area each page gets, but it does not halve the type. Two A4 portrait pages placed side by side on an A4 landscape sheet are each scaled to about 71% of their original size, because a page's linear dimensions shrink by the square root of the area reduction. That ratio is what decides legibility, and it changes quickly.

• 2-up: about 71%. A 10pt body font prints at roughly 7pt. Readable for most people, and the usual choice for handouts.
• 4-up: 50%. That 10pt font becomes 5pt. Legible in good light, tiring for more than a page or two.
• 9-up: about 33%. Body text becomes around 3pt. Fine for checking page order or spotting a blank scan, not for reading.
• 16-up: 25%. A contact sheet. You can see layout and images, not words.

Slides, mixed sizes and margins

Slides are the exception to those limits. Presentation type is large to begin with, often 24pt or more, so six or nine slides to a sheet stays perfectly readable even at a third of the original size.

Margins cost more than they seem to at high counts. Every printer has an unprintable band around the edge of the sheet, and every gap between pages is space taken away from the pages themselves. At 16-up, generous gaps can shrink each page noticeably further than the figures above. Turn on a thin border around each page if the sheets will be cut apart, or if neighbouring pages look alike and blur into each other.

Documents that mix portrait and landscape pages, or A4 and larger foldouts, need each page fitted to its slot individually. A tool that scales every page by the same factor will leave a landscape page tiny or crop it; one that fits each page separately keeps everything whole and centred.

Print dialog or a baked n-up file

The print dialog's pages-per-sheet option is the quickest route for a one-off printout, and there is nothing wrong with it. Its limitation is that the arrangement exists only for that print job. Nothing is saved, you cannot check it on screen first beyond a small preview, and the next person who prints the document gets whatever their own defaults are.

A baked n-up file is a PDF in which each page already is a sheet with several source pages placed on it. You can email it, put it on a course page, check every sheet for something lost in a gutter before printing forty copies, and print it again next term without remembering the settings. It prints identically on anyone's printer, provided they print it at actual size rather than letting the dialog scale it again.

World of PDF's Multiple Pages per Sheet tool makes these files in your browser, with layouts of 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 16 per sheet, A4, Letter or source-sized sheets, and a choice of filling across the rows or down the columns. Pages are placed as embedded page objects rather than rendered to images, so text stays selectable and vector graphics stay sharp, and bookmarks are remapped to the sheets that now carry their pages. It does n-up only; it does not produce booklet order.

Going the other way

The reverse problem is common too: a scan of an open book or a stack of 2-up printouts, where each PDF page holds two real pages. Shrinking does not help there; cutting does. Splitting each page down the middle turns the spreads back into single pages that read one at a time.

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