I'm nearing the end of a fairly long memoir - currently around 400 pages - that I intend to print in booklet form in a limited number of copies. This will not be a for-sale volume work. My files are in Word (.docx) and there are a few photos involved. The font is Georgia 11pt. Ths OS is Windows 10 and the printer is a Canon MX922. A month or so ago I did a sample printing in "booklet" form (four pages per 8 1/2 x 11, printed both sides) to see what the layout would look like and it was what I expected. The margins were adjusted for the binding and the print size was still 11pt, very readable. Yesterday, I decided to print a section in booklet form to confirm everything and it turned out to be a disaster. The margins were all wrong (very large bottom margin and no adjustment for binding), a couple of large no-text gaps, but the worst was that the print was now about 8pt, scaled down from 11pt. I've examined all the settings and found nothing that would have changed. Does anybody have any experience with this problem and could point a finger at some obscure setting that I've missed? Or would I be better to use a publishing software that would do the job (and what do you recommend). The real issue is the scaling of the text. (FYI I do have other software on my PC that are available e.g. Gimp, Inkscape, Libre Office so I'm willing to try things through them. With the number of pages I have to print I hope I don't have to do them one at a time!!!
Quartering an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet results in pages that are only 4-1/4 x 5-1/2. That's significantly smaller than a mass-market paperback book, and those are generally printed with 9- or 9.5-point type. With 11-point type your line length must be extremely short (in terms of character count). How are you setting the file up to print four pages per sheet? The booklet option in Word prints to two 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 sheets. Is there a different booklet setting or template that's part of the Canon printer driver? Is it possible that the printer driver is taking the 2-pages-per-sheet Word booklet and scaling it down to make it fit 4 pages per sheet?
my inclination would be to get a short run done from a digital printer... that'll give you a properly bound book with a professional finish, and by the time you've factored in toner, paper, and time the cost won't be much different
I agree. My understanding of the "booklet" printing function in Word is that it prints two 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 pages on each side of a sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 paper (which may be what the OP meant by "four pages per 8 1/2 x 11, printed both sides"). But they will come out organized/ordered such that the sheets can be folded in half and then stapled together into a booklet. There's a reason they call it a bookLET -- it's meant for binding just a few pages. I don't think there's any way the booklet function can handle 400 pages. Even at 4 pages per sheet of paper, that's 100 sheets of paper, and you're NOT going to bind that by stapling.
