Theater Program (booklet)

**Jim H** · 09 November 2018, 05:30 AM

Has anybody used Xara Page & Layout Designer to create a multi (30+) page 8.5 X 5.5 inch booklet like used for theater program? My booklet will contain many advertiser & patron pages as well as the show program and guest bio's, etc. If pages are created in page number order, will the print command correctly re-arrange the layout for collating and binding in the correct page number order? (Ex: for an eight page "booklet", pages 1 & 8 are on one side of a sheet and pages 2 & 7 are on the other side of the same sheet.) Have used MS Publisher in the past but has weaknesses. How about Xara P&LD?

**pauland** · 09 November 2018, 07:08 AM

On every printer I have owned that offered booklet capability (with duplex printing), that kind of functionality has been part of the printer driver itself, not the program doing the printing.

It's very easy for you to test - create a document with eight pages, stick the page number on each one, then print it selecting a booklet option and see if you get the booklet.

**Boy** · 09 November 2018, 09:43 AM

Will you be printing the booklets yourself or will you have them printed through a(n) (online) printer?

In the latter case, I would ask the printer which format your file should have. If you do it yourself and your printer has the booklet option, do a testrun as suggested by Pauland to make sure that the pages are in booklet order but also make sure the text blocks line up by holding the pages up against the light. In my experience many (home) printers are not very accurate in this respect. In addition, if you have 30+ pages you're booklet will contain at least 8+ folded sheets and excess paper needs to be cut. The more sheets of paper, the more the text starts to shift on the inner sheets: not many printers have software to compensate for this.

**Jim H** · 10 November 2018, 12:13 AM

Many thanks to Pauland and Boy. With MS Publisher I thought the functionality was in the program software. Indeed, I will make up a dummy booklet with Xara P&GD program and test if it prints out correctly. Thanks for the insight.
Jim H

**Jim H** · 10 November 2018, 06:01 AM

OK. Created dummy booklet. The printer output has some resemblance to a booklet but I can't get the 5.5 X 8.5" page to fill half the sheet. Spent over 2 hours playing around with all combinations of margins, scaling, Automatic Fit, Best Fit, Custom Fit and Scale but still can't get the designed 5.5 X 8.5 page to fit correctly into one half of the 8.5 X 11 sheet. The pagination needed for a booklet works ok but the designed page just will not fit correctly into the sheet. My feeling is that I'm missing some setting but, for the life of me, I don't know what to do next. I've reverted again to MS Publisher and verified how simple and easy this works and I am tempted to return to that old and clumsy program. What am I missing? VERY frustrating! Ideas anybody?

**Boy** · 10 November 2018, 08:27 AM

So, you want to print the booklet yourself. Perhaps you could try the following: create a dummy 8-page document in P&GD with pages in regular order (1, 2, 3 etc.) and export it as .pdf. Open the file in Publisher and see if you can change the settings and print it as a booklet.

In other words, design in P&GD and print in Publisher. I don't have Publisher anymore, so I don't know if it will work but perhaps worth a try. Good luck.

**pauland** · 10 November 2018, 08:43 AM

Originally Posted by Jim H

OK. Created dummy booklet. The printer output has some resemblance to a booklet but I can't get the 5.5 X 8.5" page to fill half the sheet. Spent over 2 hours playing around with all combinations of margins, scaling, Automatic Fit, Best Fit, Custom Fit and Scale but still can't get the designed 5.5 X 8.5 page to fit correctly into one half of the 8.5 X 11 sheet. The pagination needed for a booklet works ok but the designed page just will not fit correctly into the sheet. My feeling is that I'm missing some setting but, for the life of me, I don't know what to do next. I've reverted again to MS Publisher and verified how simple and easy this works and I am tempted to return to that old and clumsy program. What am I missing? VERY frustrating! Ideas anybody?

First of all we need to understand how the booklet printing is being processed (when using Xara).

On the printers that I have owned with a duplex unit, the printer would itself offer the opportunity to print separate pages as a booklet and in that case it would scale normal pages down to fit side by side and it would reorganise the pages so that when printed using the duplex unit (ie double-sided) everything was in the correct order for a booklet. I'm guessing that since you're having so much trouble that this isn't happening for you.

Another way to do the booklet is to manually work out the page order yourself and use Xara to lay out the booklet as two pages laid out on a single landscape page. I'm guessing that this is what publisher does behind the scenes.