Help with booklet printing

Hello there. I am hoping that there is a straightforward fix for this that perhaps involves buying a piece of software but not something terribly expensive.

I find myself printing a number of documents of late to booklets that I then saddle stitch or staple. This makes for a convenient size for me to carry around — and yes some of this has to do with the rise/return in popularity of zines.

My problem is that Adobe Acrobat, which makes this incredibly easy, also does a very poor job of it: the “images” it creates of the pages are lower resolution and you cannot control the sizing of the page images onto the printed pages. (I suppose one could crop pages in advance, but this strikes me as skeuomorphic.)

I can see a number of apps that offer this functionality on the App Store, but most of them are pay upfront and then I am left to discover how good they are. I know I can buy and then ask for a refund, but in advance of doing that, I thought I would ask fellow MPUers if they have answers.

I use “Create Booklet 2” and it does the job for me. I am not sure about image resolution but it seems ok to me. I forget the price but it is not expensive.

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It might be more than what your looking for, but Page Layout & Design Software | Black Friday 50% Off is what I use for any books I’ve printed. They should have a free trial outside the App Store as well

I can look into this more later, but I forget when I found this option in Preview.app. I maaay have added this via some third party app at some point, I can’t remember, but wanted to share this might be built into macOS.
I’m on 13.6.7 so they also may have taken this option out at some point.

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It might be something I’ve installed sometime in the past, but when I print to either my HP or the office Konica printer, and I go down to “Layout” and “Pages per Sheet,” I have the option to “Print as Booklet.” I can either continue to print or save as a PDF.

Edit: @dustying got there first! I’m on 15.1 and the option is still there. It works in all apps I use.

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My thanks to you both. I did, in fact, remember that functionality being there, but it got moved, I swear, at some point. I will play with to see if it does what I need. Essentially I have a number of PDFs which are designed to be printer on A5 / letter half-sheets, and I’d like to be able to print them with as much of their resolution, and as large, as possible. Adobe Acrobat was making a real hash of this. I will play with this built-in functionality and report back on my results.

Again, many thanks to all!

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I think and suspect this feature related to printer driver software. I don’t see what you see on my iMac with a Brother HL-L2350DW the target.

So installing the right driver, even if that printer not connected, then printing to PDF might do it. Years ago I did that “trick” with creating large format PDF’s on Windows machines by pretending I was using one of those large format HP printers even though I didn’t have one. I’ve not done same on macOS, so not sure works.

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My thanks to everyone. In the end, I decided to buy Create Booklet 2, and, honestly, it makes it pretty painless. I feel like that was $20 well spent. Terrific GUI, by the way.

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