Create a booklet from any PDF document with BookletCreator
March 19th, 2008
PDF files are a great way to make data available. Everybody can open them, and it's much easier to email an electronic file than to print out a big document, schlep over to the Post Office, and wait days or weeks for it to get to your intended audience.
Unfortunately, most PDFs are set up as letter-sized 8 1/2 x 11-inch pages. Great to read, but not so great to carry around with you, especially with a great big staple in the corner. Sometimes it would be handy to have a little booklet instead.
BookletCreator in an online tool that lets you convert your full-size PDF document into a booklet. Along with shrinking your letter-sized page down to a half-size 5 1/2 x 8 1/2-inch format, it does the heavy lifting of figuring out how to paginate things so that when you run the resulting file through your printer with a "print on both sides" instruction, it will lay the pages out correctly. For bigger documents, which are difficult to fold and staple on generally-available office equipment, you can break the booklet into multiple booklets, so that you don't have just a big wad of paper when you're done.
BookletCreator has a simple interface: browse to your document, choose whether you want to create a single- or multiple booklets, and click the button. Your document is processed and immediately fed back to your browser, downloading to your local drive. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
BookletCreator is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.
