Printing A5 Booklets using the Apple Pages App is no easy business.
You can search the internet for solutions to this problem and not come up with an answer. Most Booklet printing requires text to be flowed into text boxes and the pages (Text Boxes) to be ordered in a certain way so they appear on the correct pages in the A5 Booklet. You may have tried doing this in the 'Pages' App and run into problems. This eBook describes how I overcame those problems with a 'Work Around' method.
Some Printer drivers have a ‘Print Booklet’ option, but when I tried to use this, many of the pages came out in the wrong order, not as a booklet.
It is possible to get the pages into the right order to produce A5 booklets using the PDF feature provided in some printer drivers. However the print comes out on the PDFs at the wrong size and the margins no longer seem adjustable to a satisfactory degree.
Using the Text-Flow feature in Pages within Text Boxes does not totally solve the problem either because Text will only flow forwards from one page to the next, not backwards to previous text boxes, which would be necessary on even an A4 Folded A5, 4 page leaflet. Let alone for a 12 paged, three A4 sheet booklet. The Text-Flow feature therefore needs to be adapted.
How the booklet printing work-around works.
It is unfortunately not possible to flow text backwards in text boxes in the ‘Pages’ App from Sheet 1 Page one, to Sheet 1 page 2, to Sheet 1 Page 3, and BACKWARDS to Sheet 1 Page 4.
The work-around is designed to compensate for this deficiency. ‘Word’ users in ‘Windows’ do not have this problem to overcome. Text-flow in Word text boxes can flow backwards.
To work around this deficiency in ‘Pages’ it is therefore necessary to produce a set of ‘Pages’ templates which have consecutive Text Boxes on the correct half of the front of and the back of each page of the multi-page A5 pamphlet or booklet. (I produced 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24 page Templates). Beyond that, A5 booklets become increasingly impractical anyway. I found the A5 - 12 pages, 3 A4 sheets format, most useful for printing church service booklets and the A5 - 4 pages, 1 sheet format, for their coloured card covers.
So, each ‘Pages’ Template will contain Four (4) separate A5 Text Boxes on Four (4) separate ‘Pages’ A4 pages, for each single A4 sheet in the booklet, which eventually will be printed and folded into correctly collated and ordered A5 pages in an A5 multi-sheet booklet or single sheet A5 pamphlet.New paragraph
