How to Arrange Pages for Booklet Printing
With so many digital options available these days, many question the purpose of continuing to use printed materials. However, research shows that reading printed materials leads to better information retention. Retention, and other benefits.
Therefore, many schools, students, and companies still have a need for booklet printing.
However, placing pages in a booklet requires different formatting than sliding them into a report folder. Not sure how to arrange pages for booklet printing? Our guide will show you what you need to know.
How to Arrange Pages for Booklet Printing
Figuring out how to arrange pages for booklet printing is by far one of the trickiest parts of any printing process. Many word-processing and PDF-writing programs have built-in templates. These templates can then be uploaded to a professional printer’s website.
There are two main formats these programs will use for these templates: Printer Spreads and Reader Spreads.
What Are Printer Spreads?
Printer spreads don’t keep the pages in order by their consecutive page numbers. Rather, this method of arranging pages for booklet printing organizes the pages for printing, collating, and trimming. Certain printing clients prefer this formatting. Others prefer to avoid the headache that comes with assembling such booklets.
What Are Reader Spreads?
Reader spreads keep your pages in consecutive two-page spreads. They’re already in the perfect order for anyone who wants to read them. However, if they got collated in a traditional sense, that order would get scrambled. Thus, many online printers prefer that you do not use reader spreads if you submit material to them. Unfortunately, those tend to be the default for many templates.
Does the Style for Booklet Printing Matter for the Arrangement?
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the style of the booklet has an impact on how you need to arrange pages for booklet printing. We’ll go over the basic page arrangements used in the most common styles of booklet binding in our guide below.
- Saddle-stitching involves pages collated in page number order, folded in half, and stitched together
- Spiral-binding uses pages printed on both sides and organized in page number order with a spiral loop
- Perfect-binding uses scored sheets of paper trimmed to size and collated in page-number order
Would you like to learn more about the various ways you can arrange your pages? Do you have a booklet that you need to have printed as soon as possible? If so, then click here for more information.
One last note. It’s important to remember that saddle-stitched booklets especially require page counts in fours. Many others require that your booklet’s pages come in counts of twos.
Looking for More Booklet Printing Tips?
Figuring out how to arrange pages for booklet printing is only part of the equation when you want to design and print new material. If you’re in the market for more graphic design and booklet printing tips, then why not check out our blog? We update each day with more helpful marketing and design articles like this one.
