free create booklet pdf service mac update

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Hope it’s useful to someone! Sorry I can’t provide any support if you try it, but recommendations and improvements are welcome from anybody with more Automator stamina than me! All I can say is that it works nicely on my Mac running High Sierra (10.13.6).

Make Booklet PDF on desktop.zip (for pre-Monterey Macs) You should be able to double-click it and open it in Automator if you want to see what’s inside, but I think if you put it into your ~/Library/Services folder within your home directory, it will probably just appear as a service if you right-click on a PDF file in the Finder.

#Free create booklet pdf service mac update zip file#

So, here’s a zip file containing the Automator script. You can then delete the ‘booklet-pages’ folder. In here, it will create one PDF for each page of your document.įinally, it will work out what order these pages should be in, and create a new ‘booklet.pdf’ on your desktop with the pages reassembled in that order. 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.

#Free create booklet pdf service mac update install#

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?

#Free create booklet pdf service mac update driver#

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: