Combine several pages onto one sheet

How to Multiple Pages per Sheet

1. Add your PDF. Drop the file in. The page count and the number of sheets it will produce are shown straight away.
2. Choose how many pages per sheet. Two for a readable handout, four for lecture notes, nine or sixteen for a contact sheet of thumbnails.
3. Set the sheet and the spacing. Leave the size matching your source pages, or pick A4 or Letter. Adjust the margin and gap if the sheets will be bound or trimmed.
4. Combine and download. Save the imposed PDF.

Why do this in a file rather than the print dialog

Every print dialog can put several pages on a sheet, so the obvious question is why a tool exists at all. The answer is that the print dialog produces paper and nothing else. The arrangement lives for as long as the print job and then it is gone.

A file is different. You can email the handout to the people who could not attend, upload it to a course page, print it again next term without setting the options up from memory, or check on screen that nothing important fell in a gutter before committing forty sheets of paper to it.

It also survives the trip to someone else's printer. The layout is baked into the document, so a colleague printing your four-up handout gets four-up, rather than whatever their own defaults happen to be.

Choosing a layout that stays readable

Two pages per sheet halves the linear size of the type, which for an ordinary document printed at A4 leaves it comfortably readable. Four pages per sheet halves it again, and that is roughly the limit for body text — a 10pt document becomes about 5pt, which is legible but not pleasant.

Beyond four, treat the result as a visual index rather than something to read. Nine and sixteen up are for checking that pages are in the right order, spotting a blank page in a scan, or producing a contact sheet of a slide deck.

Slides are the exception that reads well at high density, because presentation type is enormous to begin with. Six or nine slides to a sheet is the classic handout and stays perfectly readable.

Margins, gutters and the edge of the paper

The default margin keeps the whole arrangement clear of the unprintable band every printer enforces around the edge of the sheet — usually four to five millimetres, sometimes more. Reducing the margin to zero will look correct on screen and lose a sliver of the outer pages when printed.

The gap between pages is a separate control because it does a separate job. If the sheets will be guillotined into individual cards, a wider gap gives the blade somewhere to land. If they are going into a binder, increase the margin instead and leave the gap tight.

The thin outline around each page is off by default and worth turning on for anything being cut, and for handouts where two adjacent pages have similar layouts and blur into each other without a boundary.

What happens to rotated and mixed-size pages

Each source page is fitted to its slot individually, so a document that mixes portrait and landscape pages, or A4 with A3 foldouts, is handled without any of them being stretched. Every page keeps its proportions and is centred in its cell.

Pages carrying a rotation are placed the way they display rather than the way they are stored, which sounds obvious and is the detail most implementations get wrong. A landscape scan stored as a portrait page with a rotation flag will land upright here, not on its side.

Bookmarks are remapped to point at the sheet that now carries the page they used to point at, so a long document stays navigable after imposition instead of losing its outline.

Frequently asked questions