Today, the more patient among you may care to experience the
simple joy of making your very own, unique and non-fattening sixteen page A7 booklet
of whatever content you please, with just one sheet of A4 paper, folded thrice.
The first thing I think we should do is maybe get to grips
with the folding and all that, so
the layout bit will make sense. So
we’ll just start, if we may, with a sheet of A4 paper, held with the long edge
horizontal, (i.e. landscape) and fold it in half like this:
Does it resemble a wee booklet yet? Staple or sew the spine
(it should be obvious which edge is going to be the spine) together and trim
the other edges so that all the pages open. Violin! Here are some I made
earlier:
There are three steps – the first is to get your content
sorted into sixteen text boxes, each 8cm tall by 5cm wide.
There’s a layout Word
Document here with sixteen linked text boxes – you can paste a chunk of text in
(I wouldn’t do much more than six or seven hundred words) and then mess with
the spacing, font size, put pictures and things in.
The next bit is to paste the contents of these 16 boxes into
the 16 boxes of this final template – the contents of the first text box from
step one will go in the box with a ‘1’ in it, the second box in ‘2’ and so on,
in logical sequence. When it comes to putting the paper back in the printer to
print the second side, the reverse of the paper from pages 16 and 9 should
go back into the printer first. You could try just printing the blank template
first (well, with just the page numbers on it) to check it all lines up ok in
your printer and the pages are printed back to back, so there’s no
bleed-through (as we say in the booklet world) and also the pages should be in
the right order and the right way up.
If you have ‘Office clipboard’ (it’s in Edit> in Office
XP) or something that will copy more than one thing at a time, then it’s not
too much of a drag pasting the content into the final template.
I think this is enough – I can sense you are ready. Enjoy!
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Please feel free to email me with questions - naldo@naldo.co.uk