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Friday, March 9, 2012

Printing A5 on to A4 sheets of paper

When we prepare letters for parents the information is enough to fit in one single sided A5.

Using Microsoft word which has the A4 size as standard makes many people re-size and configure their document dimensions and page breaks to get 2 copies of A5 printed on one A4. It's best to not care about the size of the virtual paper you type to in word and instruct the printer to do the job for you.

This is the trick to print a normal word document in A5 size, 2 copies on one A4 paper.

First prepare you letter as per usual, don't worry about size or anything, this is handled automatically.

When you are ready to print bring up the print dialogue and use these settings:


Pages: 1,1 (this means you want to print page 1 twice)
Pages per sheet: 2 pages (this means you want to include 2 pages on one sheet)
Number of copies: half as much (if you have 20 letters to go out you will only need 10 copies!)

The magic is the combination of those settings. Scaling and size is left on the printer, i.e. the paper type in the tray. That's usualy A4 size, so selecting 2 pages on one sheet gets it scaled down to A5. However if you do not type 1,1 as a page range then page 1 will be printed alone next to page nothing, i.e. you'll have a half empty A5.

Once you get the printout all you got to do is cut the copies in half, saving ink and paper.

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