You've got a 60-slide deck to hand out, or a long draft to proofread on paper, and printing one page per sheet would eat half a ream. Putting 2, 4 or 6 pages on each sheet cuts that down to something sensible.
Printers call this N-up, where N is the number of pages per sheet. Your print dialog can probably do it already. N-up on EddiesPDF does it to the file instead, which turns out to be the better option more often than you'd think.
Print setting or new file
Chrome's print dialog has "Pages per sheet" under More settings. Adobe Acrobat Reader has a "Multiple" option under Page Sizing & Handling. Preview on a Mac has "Pages per Sheet" in its Layout section. For a one-off printout on your own computer, use them.
Making an N-up PDF is worth it when:
- You're sending the file to someone else, a print shop, or a school or office printer you can't control.
- You're printing from a phone, where the print options are usually thin.
- You want a specific order, margins or borders, and the same result every time.
- You want a compact overview to read on screen, like a whole slide deck on a few pages.
The PDF you get is just pages. Print it at "Actual size" or "Fit", one page per sheet, and the layout is already done.
What happens to each page
N-up builds a brand new PDF. Each sheet is divided into a grid, and each original page is drawn into a cell, scaled down evenly so it fits without stretching. The text and graphics stay as text and vector shapes, so a 4-up printout is small but still sharp, not a blurry screenshot.
Shrinking is the catch. On a sheet the same size as the original page, 2-up shrinks each page to roughly 65-70% of its size and 4-up to roughly half. Normal 11-point body text at 4-up prints at about 5 points. That's fine for slides with big type and hard going for a dense report. For text-heavy documents, I'd stop at 2-up.
The grid is filled one sheet at a time. With 4-up, pages 1 to 4 go on the first sheet, 5 to 8 on the second, and so on. A 10-page file gives you 3 sheets, and the last one has two empty cells.
Because the result is a new document, a few things from the original don't come along. Bookmarks aren't copied, and links and comments are left out. Filled-in form fields are drawn into the page first so the answers aren't lost.
Making an N-up PDF
- Open N-up and add your PDF.
- Under "Pages per sheet", pick 2-up, 4-up, 6-up, 8-up, 9-up, 16-up or 32-up. 4-up is the default.
- Set "Page ordering": "Horizontal" fills each row left to right, then the next row. "Vertical" fills each column top to bottom.
- Open "More options" for "Sheet size", "Orientation", "Margins" and "Page borders".
- Check the preview of sheet 1 and the line under the file name, which tells you how many sheets you'll get.
- Click "Create N-up PDF" and download the result, named something like yourfile-4-up.pdf.
"Orientation" is best left on "Auto". It works out which way round the sheet shows the pages largest. For portrait pages, 2-up comes out as a landscape sheet with two pages side by side, and 4-up as a portrait sheet with a 2 x 2 grid, which is usually what you'd pick by hand anyway.
"Margins" defaults to "Medium". Choose "None" or "Small" to make the pages bigger. Keep some margin if you're printing on an office printer, though, since most can't print right to the edge of the paper. "Page borders" draws a thin line round each page, which helps with slides that have white backgrounds and would otherwise blur into each other.
"Sheet size" is "Same as original" unless you change it. A4, Letter and A3 are the other choices. A3 is worth knowing about: 2-up on A3 gives each page roughly its original A4 size.
That's also what unticking "Preserve original page size" does in a more general way. Pages are kept at full size and the sheet grows to hold them. It's for printing on large paper or for viewing on screen, not for an ordinary desktop printer.
For Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left documents, tick "Right to left document" so the first page lands on the right.
N-up isn't a booklet
People often reach for 2-up when they want a folded booklet, and it doesn't work. Fold a stack of 2-up sheets down the middle and the pages come out in the wrong order.
A booklet needs imposition: the pages rearranged so they're in sequence after folding. For an 8-page booklet on two sheets printed double-sided, the first sheet carries pages 8 and 1 on the front and 2 and 7 on the back. The second sheet has 6 and 3, then 4 and 5. N-up keeps the pages in their original order, so it can't do that on its own.
If your printer or Adobe Acrobat Reader has a booklet print option, use that. Otherwise, you can reorder the pages first in Organize pages (the guide on rearranging PDF pages shows how), then make a 2-up PDF and print it double-sided, flipping on the short edge. It's fiddly for more than a dozen pages, and the page count has to be a multiple of 4, so add blank pages at the end if needed.
Before you print a whole stack
Print just the first sheet and look at it at arm's length. If you can't read it comfortably, go down one step (6-up to 4-up, or 4-up to 2-up) or set "Margins" to "None". If it's a handout people will write on, 2-up or 4-up with "Page borders" ticked leaves room for notes beside each slide. And if the original pages are a mix of sizes, every page is fitted into the same cell, so a landscape page among portrait ones will come out smaller. Resize PDF can make them all one size first.
Also useful: Organize pages · Resize PDF
