PDF Booklet / N-up Maker

Booklet mode reorders pages using standard saddle-stitch imposition, the layout that makes a stack of sheets read in the correct order once they're all folded in half together and stapled down the fold. N-up mode is much simpler: it just groups pages sequentially, 2 or 4 per sheet, in a plain grid - no reordering, no folding, meant for handouts you'll print and hand out flat, not turn into a booklet.

Because a booklet isn't printed one page at a time - it's printed as a stack of sheets that all get folded together at once. If the sheets were printed in simple sequential order, folding the stack would scramble the reading order completely. The reordering this tool applies - the same standard imposition used by professional print shops and tools like psbook - exactly compensates for that fold, so once you print, stack, fold and staple, the finished booklet reads 1, 2, 3... straight through.

Print the downloaded PDF double-sided, using your printer's "flip on short edge" duplex setting (not long edge - that would flip the back pages upside down relative to the front). Print at 100% scale rather than "fit to page," since the output is already sized correctly. Once printed, stack the sheets in the order they printed, fold the entire stack in half together, and staple along that fold (saddle-stitch binding) - that's it.

The tool automatically pads the document with blank pages at the end until the count reaches the next multiple of 4, since booklet imposition needs that to come out even - a 6-page document becomes 8 for layout purposes, adding 2 blanks. This is completely standard in booklet printing; the tool shows you exactly how many blank pages were added before you generate the file.

Each output sheet is sized to fit two (or four, in N-up mode) copies of your source document's own page size side by side, based on the first page's dimensions - so a document made of US Letter pages produces booklet sheets roughly Letter-width doubled, and a document made of A4 pages produces sheets sized around A4 doubled, and so on.

This tool sizes every cell based on the first page's dimensions, so a document with genuinely mixed page sizes may have some pages scaled down more than others to fit a uniform cell rather than each page getting its own custom-fitted size. For the cleanest result, this works best on documents with a single consistent page size throughout, which covers the large majority of real-world PDFs.

Printing handouts efficiently - fitting two or four slides, pages or worksheets onto a single sheet of paper to save paper and printing cost, without any folding or binding involved. It's also handy for quickly proofing a document's layout across multiple pages at a glance. The pages stay in plain original reading order, top to bottom, left to right across the grid.

Each source page is scaled down to fit its smaller cell on the output sheet (half size for booklet or 2-up, roughly quarter size for 4-up), the same trade-off any N-up printing makes - fine print or small diagrams can become harder to read at that reduced size. The underlying PDF content itself isn't recompressed or degraded in the process, it's simply displayed smaller, so a high-resolution original still prints cleanly, just at a smaller physical size per page.

No. The entire process - reading the source pages and building the new, rearranged PDF - runs in your browser using pdf-lib. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Not currently - this tool supports 2-up and 4-up for the grid mode, which are by far the two most commonly used handout layouts, plus the 2-per-sheet booklet mode. Support for other grid sizes isn't available yet.

Yes - the imposition logic works identically regardless of length; a 40-page document produces 10 sheets the same way an 8-page one produces 2. The practical limit is physical, not something this tool imposes: a very thick stack of folded sheets gets harder to fold neatly and staple flat, and simple saddle-stitch binding typically works well up to somewhere around 60-80 pages depending on paper weight - beyond that, a print shop would usually switch to perfect binding (glued spine) instead, which isn't something a simple fold-and-staple booklet supports either way.

Make sure your print dialog isn't set to any automatic "fit to page" or "scale to fit" option, since the output sheets are already sized correctly for two (or four) source pages - an extra automatic scale can shift or shrink the layout unexpectedly. It's also worth confirming your printer isn't adding its own extra margins beyond what's already in the generated PDF, particularly if you're printing close to the paper's edge.