A5 Booklet Printing

[Albacore]

Don't waste your time as Xara will fight with your printer driver. Just open a new doc. set to A4 landscape and you might want to set up some guides as a help to configure your newsletter and then save it as a template. Once done then you can use this as your monthly newsletter template and just work from there. Figure out your imposition normally odd numbers are on the right hand side of the page with evens on the left and then copy and paste from your A5 doc. into your A4 landscape in the correct order. It sounds as if you are going to to print on double sided output so you are going to have to know what page goes with the other side and I would suggest that you do this before you start copying and pasting. D Pro6 is not a true DTP programme so that is why you have this hassle when you try to print.

[Ian B]

Thanks for all the advice. I now seem to have got it sorted. Re-installed Printer Driver (don't know if that had any effect) and then converted a test document to pdf. Managed to print this correctly on Samsung ML-2850 with the following settings :
Print Setup : Paper A4 Portrait
Properties : Paper Orientation : Portrait
Layout Options : Booklet Printing
At this point the duplex option greys out which was probably one of the things that was causing my confusion (as this didn't occur with Publisher as I recollect).
When this printed correctly from Adobe Acrobat I went back to the original Xara document and put in the above settings and lo and behold - it worked!
Thanks again for the help.
I am sure I am going to find this site very useful now I have decided to concentrate on using Xara Designer for the production of this club magazine.

[Ian B]

Oops - spoke too soon. When printing the magazine in full the page order is correct but each page is reduced in size with a large margin around it. Reduced Spread on Page Size option to 0cm but this didn't have any effect. Back to the drawing board.

[GerryI]

If the printer driver is set to A4 and is in A5 booklet mode then it should be telling the application that it is effectively using A5 paper automatically.

If the pages are being shrunk slightly then it sounds like you are using the "Best fit" option. This tries to fit the whole of your document paper size within the print margins of whatever paper size the printer driver is set to. Try setting the print layout options either to "Automatic fit" (this ignores the print margins reported by the printer driver) or to "Custom fit" with the top and left margins set to 0.

Just use a 4 page doc for testing until you find working settings.

Gerry

[Ian B]

Hi GerryI. Thanks. You have just suggested more or less what I had been doing in the last hour. The four page test document certainly saved a lot of waste paper.
I had been fiddling around with the Custom Fit and Automatic Fit Options as well as reducing the amount of space (margins) I had left around my text boxes and graphics. I have now got it produce just what I wanted. Thank goodness for that, I didn't want to have to go back to Publisher. Long Live Xara!