Two A5 pages on one A4 page

[Veerle]

Hi,

I need to print an A5 document on A4 sheets with 2 A5 pages on one
sheet. So I tried the print 2 pages on one sheet functionality of
Word. Since an A5 sheet has exactly half the size of an A4 sheet; when
I cut the A4 sheet in two; a should be left with two A5 sheets as I
designed them in Word. But that is not the case, since Word shrinks
the two A5 sheets a bit and create an extra margin around them. I
would like for Word not to add any extra margins, just print the two
A5s on the A4 sheet, next to one another, so that when I cut the page
in two, I am left with two pages that have the exact layout of my A5
document in Word.

Any idea on how I can accomplish that? Or should I just create an A4
page with two columns an go with it like that? I hope not...

Kind regards,
Veerle

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Interactions between Word and printers are complicated, and maybe they
depend on your make and model and driver of printer.

A convenient workaroud would be to print your document to pdf and then
print it out of Adobe Reader, which only messes with the scale when
the sizes don't come out even, which they will when you're doing A5 to
A4..

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think that, as Peter implies, it's not Word but your printer driver that's
responsible for the shrinkage. I have had that problem when printing to an
inkjet printer with an unprintable area smaller than my margins (I don't
experience the problem with my laser printer).

Do you get the same result if you use the "2 pages per sheet" option in Page
Setup rather than the Print dialog? Note that the Print dialog option is
intended to shrink A4 documents to print twice on an A4 sheet. The Page
Layout option, however, allows you to create your A5 documents normally, and
print them 2-up.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Veerle]

I think that, as Peter implies, it's not Word but your printer driver that's
responsible for the shrinkage. I have had that problem when printing to an
inkjet printer with an unprintable area smaller than my margins (I don't
experience the problem with my laser printer).

Do you get the same result if you use the "2 pages per sheet" option in Page
Setup rather than the Print dialog? Note that the Print dialog option is
intended to shrink A4 documents to print twice on an A4 sheet. The Page
Layout option, however, allows you to create your A5 documents normally, and
print them 2-up.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USAhttp://word.mvps.org

It seems that I didn't explain this correctly . I did use the "2
pages per sheet" in the page setup of Word and not some feature of my
printer. And this is the one that shrinks my 2 A5 pages to show them
next to one another with margins at the top, bottom, left, right and
between the 2 pages. I want the same thing, but without the margins.

I tried it in Acrobat Reader as well, because there you have a "2
pages per sheet" option in the print dialog as well, but this does the
same thing. It creates margins everywhere...

Here is a drawing to explain what I get now and what I want:
http://users.telenet.be/veerleverbr/tmp/questionword.png

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

By default, using the "2 pages per sheet" option in Page Setup (not the Zoom
setting in the Print dialog) will give you exactly what you ask for. If the
pages are being shrunk, then that is down to your printer driver, not Word.
I use this setting all the time, and the margins I get on the page are the
margins I set in Word. You might want to make sure that Letter/A4 resizing
is disabled.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org