Printing two-sided brochures in OpenOffice.org Writer: easy as pie, if you know a couple tricks about how to make pie
An email conversation with Don revived my interest in brochures.
I've got a template here for a tri-fold brochure. It uses connected frames. Right-click on the link and choose to save it to your computer if you'd like to look at it.
However, what if you want something more normal, just something like this? You want to rotate a letter or A4 piece of paper 90 degrees, and fold it in half.
This means some juggling with the page printing order. For the folding to come out right, you need an eight-page brochure to print like this. Half are on one side of the paper and half are on the other.
You could do this through mental gyrations. Or you can do it with the OpenOffice.org Writer brochure setting under print options.
You just need to do a few things to make it work well.
Step 1: Set up your page normally (portrait) but....
For whatever reason, the brochure printing prints a little short of filling the eight vertical inches appropriately. So for printing on letter size paper sideways, I recommend an 8 1/2 by 13 page size. Choose Format > Page, Page tab and set the size there. I also recommend mirrored setup and a nice big inner margin as shown.
Step 2: Make your content and heading fonts a little bigger
The whole document will be shrunk when it's turned and printed so I recommend increasing all font sizes about 2 points, possibly more for extra readability.
Step 3: Print using the brochure options and print Landscape (additional details vary depending on your printer)
Choose File > Print. Click Options. Select the Brochure option. Click OK.
In the OpenOffice.org print window, just click Properties and find the option to print Landscape.
If your printer also lets you print double-sided, select that option too. And you're done.
If your printer doesn't do double-sided, you'll need to do this instead.
Print the brochure in two passes:
A) Choose File > Print and click Options. Set these options to print only half the pages:
B) In the print window, click Properties and set up the printer to print landscape. Print.
C) Then put the pages that you've printed into the printer again, choose File > Print again, and choose these options instead to print the other half of the pages AND to reverse order.
And of course print Landscape this time too.
Here's a template if you'd like to download it and fiddle with it. Right-click on the link and choose to save it to your computer.
Download the template, with screenshots and directions.
Download the template without screenshots or directions.
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