A5 Booklet Printing

**Ian B** · 01 August 2010, 03:26 PM

I have been a long-time user of Xara drawing programs since Artworks on the Acorn Archimedes. Primarily I have used them to create graphics which are then added to documents in, for example, Publisher 2010.

I have been using Publisher 2010 beta for the production of a club magazine, typically 28 pages, but this month have decided not to buy the finished Publisher 2010 product and use Xara Designer Pro 6 to produce the entire magazine. Having created most of the 28 pages in A5 size I now wish to print these out as a booklet (pages 1 & 28 on the back of pages 2 & 27, etc).

I have a Samsung duplex monochrome printer which has done this successfully in the past but I am having problems printing out my Xara Designer creation. Is this possible? Is it one of these very simple problems that manage to defeat me for hours on end?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Ian B

**gwpriester** · 01 August 2010, 03:46 PM

Welcome to TalkGraphics Ian

What kinds of problems are you experiencing?

I cannot think why this would not work.

**Ian B** · 01 August 2010, 04:07 PM

Thanks gwpriester.

If I know it should work I can have another go. Basically, having select Booklet Printing on the printer driver menu, the duplex options are getting blanked out and the output is one-sided with the portrait A5 pages slightly enlarged and rotated and printed on one side only.

I have always found this confusing but if you are confident it ought to work I'll try again.

**gwpriester** · 01 August 2010, 04:13 PM

Let us know if you still have problems. It may well be a printer bug. Xara tries to test as many printers and as many options as possible but there are always some instances that fall through the cracks.

I've alerted the people at Xara and they will see if they can come up with any solutions if any are required.

**Sadler** · 01 August 2010, 09:23 PM

Hi,

Obviously different printers and their respective drivers are different but assuming that your printer can really impose to A5 booklet format here's my recommendation. Set your document out like the first layout in the image rather than the second (which is the default for double page spread documents). You'll have to turn off "make all pages the same" to do this. This won't help with the actual printing but it does help with visualising the document. Then when you're printing, choose the booklet option in your printer driver and choose the option to print double page spreads as single pages in Xara.

In my (limited) experience the duplex and the booklet options should be mutually exclusive since they're trying to achieve different things. So if you've chosen booklet, duplex probably should be disabled.

**Ian B** · 01 August 2010, 09:46 PM

Thanks for the above suggestion but I don't think that sorts the printing problem. At the moment I am just using 28 consecutive single A5 pages. This is what I did with Microsoft Publisher and had no trouble using booklet format and duplex printing - automatically printing page 1 alongside page 28 with pages 2 and 27 on the back, etc. Collating the pages made it very easy to run off several complete copies of the magazine.

The printer has not been changed (Samsung ML2850) nor the computer. It's just the change to Xara which seems to be causing a problem. It does seem that booklet and duplex are now mutually incompatible where they weren't before.

**Sadler** · 01 August 2010, 10:13 PM

If you want to try taking Xara out of the equation, export to PDF and print from there perhaps.

**Nostaw** · 01 August 2010, 10:47 PM

Originally Posted by Ian B

Having created most of the 28 pages in A5 size I now wish to print these out as a booklet (pages 1 & 28 on the back of pages 2 & 27, etc).

What you are asking about is called Impositioning (see wiki), which is not supported by Xara. I have faced this problem several times myself and just use Microsoft Publisher If I need to print it myself. If I print professional booklets I give the PDF to the printer and they do it all for me.

Microsoft Publisher doesn't support full impositioning either but it will do booklets the way you require in the book printing options.

**Sadler** · 01 August 2010, 11:19 PM

The Samsung printer mentioned does do booklet printing (I checked) so one shouldn't need the DTP application to impose the file before sending it to the printer.

Here's what the manual says:

This printer feature allows you to print your document on both
sides of the paper and arranges the pages so that the paper can
be folded in half after printing to produce a booklet.
1 To change the print settings from your software
application, access the printer properties. See “Printing a
Document” on page 12.
2 From the Layout tab, choose Booklet Printing from the
Layout Type drop-down list.
NOTE: The Booklet Printing option is not available for all
paper sizes. In order to find out the available paper size for
this feature, select the paper size in the Size option on the
Paper tab, then check if the Booklet Printing in a Layout
Type drop-down list on the Layout tab is activated.
3 Click the Paper tab, and select the paper source, size, and
type.
4 Click OK and print the document.
5 After printing, fold and staple the pages.

Of course many printers can't impose so there are many solutions if you want to impose yourself (mainly PDF based). Let me say that I print booklets all the time from Xara without issues (on a Konica printer though which folds and staples the doc for me too

).

One thing I have to set in my printer driver (although I'm sure it won't apply to you) is that for A5 booklet printing, I have to set the page size to A5 and the paper size to A4.

**Nostaw** · 01 August 2010, 11:28 PM

We have a big industrial Toshiba e-Studio 6530c color copier/printer and it supports duplex printing. I have spend hours figuring out settings and didn't get it to work to print from Xara - the pages printed all over the place in a weird order (I ensured the rule of 4 and settings). No problems using M$ Publisher.