Print a PDF as a booklet you can fold and staple

Make the booklet file

1. Drop the PDF.
2. Under Layout, choose Booklet.
3. Under Paper, choose the sheet you will print on: A4 for an A5 booklet, US Letter for a half-letter one, A3 for an A4 one.
4. Leave Gap at 5 mm for a small margin at the fold and around the edges, or set it to 0 so each page fills exactly half the sheet.
5. Choose Lay out and download the file, named like programme-booklet.pdf.

The pages are placed as vectors, not pictures, so text stays sharp and searchable. Our 500-page test file became a 250-side booklet (125 sheets) in about 1.2 seconds.

Why page 1 and the last page share a sheet

Take 2 sheets of paper, fold them in the middle and number the pages. You get this:

The outermost sheet holds the covers: the last page on the left of its front and page 1 on the right. Its back holds pages 2 and 7. The next sheet in holds 6 and 3, then 4 and 5, and the middle of the booklet is always the 2 middle pages side by side. A normal print of pages 1 to 8 cannot produce this; the pages must be reordered first. That reordering is called imposition, and it is what Booklet mode does. We checked the 8-page case: the 4 sides come out as 8 and 1, 2 and 7, 6 and 3, 4 and 5.

Printer settings that must be exact

Most failed booklets are a printer setting, not the file. In the print dialog of Chrome, Edge, Acrobat Reader or your system:

1. Print on both sides. Called duplex, two-sided or “print on both sides”, depending on the driver.
2. Flip on the short edge. Also shown as short-edge binding. The booklet sheet lies on its side, so the back is printed turned around the short edge. With long-edge flipping, every back side comes out upside down; switch to short-edge flipping and print again.
3. Scale 100%, also called Actual size. “Fit to page” shrinks the sheet a little and moves the fold off the middle.
4. Paper size as chosen in step 3 above, A4 for an A5 booklet.
5. Landscape, or let the dialog choose. The booklet file’s sheets are already landscape; most dialogs pick it up on their own.
6. Do not also choose a booklet or “pages per sheet” option in the printer driver. The file is already laid out; doing it again shrinks or reshuffles it.

Print 1 sheet first: sides 1 and 2 of the file. Fold it. If page 1 sits on the front with page 2 behind it, print the rest.

No duplex on your printer? Print the odd sides (1, 3, 5…) first, put the printed stack back into the tray turned over, then print the even sides. Which way the stack goes back depends on the printer, so test with 1 sheet.

Page counts that are not a multiple of 4

Every folded sheet carries 4 pages, so a booklet always has 4, 8, 12, 16… pages. When your PDF has another count, Booklet mode adds blank pages at the end. A 10-page file becomes a 12-page booklet: pages 11 and 12 are blank, so the inside of the back cover and the back cover itself stay empty, and page 1 sits alone on the front of the first sheet with a blank beside it.

The back is usually the right place for blanks: a blank back cover looks intentional, a blank page 2 does not. If you want them elsewhere, for example a blank page after the title page so chapter 1 opens on the right, add them yourself first in Organise PDF, which can add a blank page at the end and move it with Up and Down, until the count is a multiple of 4. Then make the booklet. The page order guide has more on moving pages.

Fold, staple, check

1. Keep the printed sheets in the order they came out, sheet 1 on the outside.
2. Fold the whole stack in the middle at once, with page 1 facing out. When the stack is too thick to fold cleanly, fold each sheet alone and nest them in order.
3. Staple twice on the fold, about a quarter of the way in from each end. A long-reach stapler does it from the outside; without one, open the booklet flat on a thick piece of cardboard, staple through from the inside and bend the legs over by hand.
4. Check: page 1 is on the front, the last page on the back, and the pages read in order.

The honest part

• Links, form fields and comments do not survive. Each page is placed on the sheet as a vector copy. Text stays text, but clickable links, fillable fields and notes are left behind, and the tool says so when the file had them. For a printed booklet that rarely matters; fill or flatten a form first if its answers must show.
• The grid follows the first page. A file whose pages have very different shapes gets extra white space around the odd ones out. Print a PDF right helps when sizes are mixed.
• No creep compensation. In a thick booklet the inner sheets stick out a little at the open edge after folding, because they wrap around fewer sheets. Print shops shift the inner pages slightly outward to make up for it, and trim. Booklet mode does not; for a thin programme or zine the difference is too small to notice, and for a thick one a 5 mm gap keeps text clear of an uneven or trimmed edge.
• Pages get smaller. An A4 page on half an A4 sheet is A5, about 71% of its size; with the 5 mm gap, about 67%. Text set at 11 pt prints at about 7.5 pt. Check that small print stays readable.

The alternative: let Acrobat Reader do it

Acrobat Reader can impose a booklet at print time from your original file. Adobe’s help page “Print booklets using Acrobat or Reader” describes it (checked on 11 October 2026): choose File, Print, then Booklet under Page Sizing and Handling, set Booklet subset to Both sides (or front side only, then back side only, on a printer without duplex), and pick the Binding, normally Left. Use either Acrobat’s Booklet setting or the getPDF booklet file, never both. The getPDF route helps when you print from a browser, on a printer with no booklet option, or want a file you can check before you print or send to a copy shop. More on getting prints right is in the printing guide, and handouts with 4 or 6 slides a sheet are in the slides guide.