Printing a booklet
Every parish office photocopier can produce a proper folded booklet. Almost none of them are asked to correctly.
A service booklet is an A4 sheet, printed on both sides, folded once down the middle. Fold it and you have four A5 pages. Nest several sheets inside each other and you have eight, twelve, sixteen. This is called saddle-stitch, and it is the format almost every parish booklet in the country uses.
The difficulty is that page 1 of your service is not printed in the top-left position of the sheet. Working out what goes where is called imposition, and doing it by hand is where the Saturday evening goes.
The method
- Get the page count to a multiple of four. A folded sheet always makes four pages. Twelve pages works; thirteen does not. See why the page count must divide by four.
- Impose the pages. Each side of each A4 sheet carries two A5 pages, and which two depends on the total count. On a twelve-page booklet, the outermost sheet carries pages 12 and 1 on one side, 2 and 11 on the other.
- Print on A4, landscape, double-sided, flipping on the short edge. This is the setting everyone gets wrong — see short edge or long edge. Long-edge flipping gives you a booklet with every other page upside down.
- Fold down the middle and staple twice on the fold if you want it held together. A long-arm stapler helps; a heavy ruler and a firm crease will do.
Paper
| Weight | Feels like | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| 80gsm | Ordinary copier paper | The everyday Sunday booklet. Cheapest, and perfectly adequate. |
| 100gsm | Noticeably substantial | Festivals; anything a visitor takes home. |
| 120gsm cover + 80gsm inner | A proper little booklet | Christmas, Easter, patronal festival. Needs two print runs. |
| 160gsm+ | Card | Covers only. Most office copiers will jam on a full run of this. |
Cream or ivory stock reads more easily under the yellowish light of most church buildings than bright white, and photographs better. It also hides the slight show-through that 80gsm duplex printing always has.
Common failures
- Every other page upside down — you flipped on the long edge. Change to short edge.
- Pages in the wrong order after folding — the imposition is wrong, or the printer reversed the stack.
- Blank page in the middle — your page count was not a multiple of four and the padding landed badly. Move it to the back.
- Text too close to the fold — the inner margin needs more room than the outer, because the fold eats it.
- Grey, muddy printing — the original was made at screen resolution. Print from a PDF, not from a screenshot.
Questions
How do I print an A5 booklet on an ordinary church photocopier?
Impose the A5 pages two-up on A4 landscape, print double-sided flipping on the short edge, then fold down the middle. The page count must be a multiple of four.
What paper should we use for service booklets?
80gsm copier paper is fine for the weekly booklet. 100gsm for festivals. Cream or ivory reads more easily than bright white under church lighting and hides show-through.
Why is every other page upside down in our booklet?
The printer is flipping on the long edge. Change the duplex setting to flip on the short edge.