Gary, I am with you on this.
My first approach would be to fit 2 pages per sheet in your PDF viewer.
Just for Proofing
If using just Xara, I would create a double width page, fit a text area to it and change to 2-columns with automatic page creation.
This allows you to tweak inner and outer guttering as well as individual page layout.
Page numbering is still the Xara failing in DTP.
Acorn
Bookmarks