I’m preparing a miniature book-style document—that is, I plan on stacking the sheets one on top of the other and binding them in the center, where two portrait pages are printed on each side of the landscape US letter sheet of paper.
I’m working with 2016 Microsoft Word for Mac (version 15.24) and OS X El Capitan (version 10.11.6).
The first thing I noticed was that the Mac version does not seem to have a feature that automatically prints documents booklet style. Therefore, I edited the page setup within Microsoft Word so that each page has the dimensions 5.5” × 8.5” (exactly half of a US letter sheet). Then, I exported the document as a PDF and rearranged the pages appropriately so that I could bind the document as a booklet in the middle (as opposed to a packet with a staple in the corner).
The problem occurs when I select my paper size in print preview:
It appears that when I select “US Letter” as my paper size with “2 Pages per Sheet,” Preview automatically prints two scaled-down US letter pages on one US letter sheet rather than letting each half-US-letter page take up half of the sheet. As a result, I have a large margin of dead space around each page of content.
Are there any ways to troubleshoot this problem? How can I ‘outsmart’ the system so that my content takes up the entire sheet?
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Edit: I’ve been meaning to order A4 paper anyways since I’m an international student and I like its dimensions better anyways. I have some coming in on Monday, and the proportions of A4 paper will resolve the issue. Nevertheless, I would still like to be able to print booklets on US letter paper, just to know how.