*** From the Archives ***
This article is from August 18, 2008, and is no longer current.
Print Blank Pages Messes Up Print Booklet
David wrote:
I’m trying to print a small booklet with the print booklet feature in InDesign CS3 and it keeps giving me the message that it has added 2 blank pages to create the booklet.
In the past several years of posts, the Number 1 most-commented post has been Steve Werner’s article about using Print Booklet in CS3. Clearly a lot of people have had problems with this feature! The problem is that when a blog post has 120 comments, a lot of people don’t want to read them all (I don’t blame them!) even if there are some nuggets of gold in them thar hills. For example, I believe the answer to David’s question above is hiding in there.
Whenever I hear that Print Booklet is adding pages, I figure the answer is probably one of two things:
- The total page count isn’t divisible by four. For example, a 14-page document set up to print Saddle Stitched (in the Print Booklet dialog box), will get two extra pages added to it, for a total of 16. This makes sense because each sheet of paper (when printed double-sided and folded) includes four pages, two on front and two on back.
- The less obvious problem is that of blank pages. InDesign won’t print blank pages by default, and therefore Print Booklet doesn’t see them. So if you have a 16-page document with 2 blank pages, then Print Booklet warns you that it will add two blank pages at the end — probably not what you want.
If you do have one or more blank pages in your document, and you want them to print like that, you need to take emergency action: Click the Print Settings button at the bottom of the Print Booklet dialog box. That opens the Print dialog box.
Now turn on the Print Blank Pages checkbox and click OK. InDesign stops deleting pages from the middle and subsequently adding them to the end, and you’re good to go.
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I hope they bring back the functionality of CS2’s inbooklet to CS4. I loved being able to make a new document. And yes, I have tried the free create booklet script, but it isn’t the same.
BINGO!
That did the trick. The only issue I have now is that InDesign still tells me – via the pages dialog box — that I have 16 pages in 9 spreads when it should be 8 spreads. Right? I’m not going nuts here am I?
BTW…I’ll be mining these comments for purtty little nuggets like this in the future.
No, you’re not going nuts, David. Good point: The Pages panel isn’t thinking in terms of printer spreads. So page 1 is all by itself on a “spread.” So is page 16. All together: 9 spreads for 16 pages.
David, on my preview page 1 shows a blank page next to it and then page two also shows a blank page next to it is this normal before i send to print…
i agree, fritz. d@mn quark for buying out alap and killing adobe’s link to the original booklet plugin. wish adobe had made that move instead.
quark’s the one that bought them out?
sounds like the last ditch effort of a dying software.
FWIW, InBooklet wasn’t without its problems. While it did a decent job of printing booklets, it was less-than-stellar in creating new documents.
Any items that crossed the spine couldn’t be handled and, if I remember correctly, number lists tended to get messed up.
In short, it wasn’t that great a loss except for very simple documents.
no, wasn’t without its problems, but i liked it better than what we have now.
I CANNOT figure out how to print a postcard two-up??????.GRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Help!
Sorry……that’s in InDesign
Hallelujah! I love you. I spent an hour trying ot figure out how to get rid of the balnk pages it kept adding. you are awesome.
Thanks for your tips on printing the blank pages, was driving me nuts…however when I save as a PDF and print preview in ‘print booklet’ mode I’m back to sqaure 1!!! All of sudden the pages don’t match up how they’re supposed to once again. It’s as if now acrobat doesn’t recognise those blank pages despite putting a transparent rectangle in them. ARRRGHHH!!!
So what if you have a document that isn’t divisible bt four (mine is 10 pages) and you did check the “print blank pages” dialog box?
Ads, you’re probably fixed by now..but to get around your pdf woes export a “.indd.ps” file by using print booklet, and then open that file with adobe distiller, and voila! You’ll have a usable print ready pdf. It took me some cracking.
Geeze, it’s that simple?! Number of pages must be divisible by four. Thank you very much!
thank you, thank you so much for this!
My document was 24 pages and I had checked the first ‘print blank pages’, but didn’t realize that you had to go one more window in and check the 2nd ‘print blank pages’ options.
I was wracking my brain and thankfully found your page.
You are a lifesaver!!
OH! that was it!!! you are all a lifesaver!!
Dear Sir,
I want to know how to booklet setup when I make ready for positive 8 page back to back format.
I need top 2 page head down but indesign can support this kind of forma seeting?
@Akash: InDesign’s imposition booklet feature is not very powerful. It may be better to use a tool such as QuiteImposing or Quark’s Print Collection or some other tool that does the imposition from inside Acrobat.
I have a 16 page booklet set to 2 up Saddle Stitch – but InDesign CS4 adds a blank page in front of the first page in the Print Booklet option and throws off all the other pages. How do I stop this?
Ekibby
I am using the Print Booklet feature and everything goes smooth and it saves a Post script file for me.
I distill it and open it as a pdf. But the quality is low. When I compare it to a regular high res pdf, the postscript derived pdf looks quite pixelated!
Has anyone else experienced this? Please help.
Thanks!
@J: Sounds like you need to check your Acrobat Distill job options.
I got an version 5 of Acrobat. Kinda old. I can not print to Distiller and not as Postscript. They all hang up. I actually don’t need Acrobat when working with Indesign, so why but this expensive thing? I want InBooklet back! It worked like a charme.
Well, I found that in CS5 it really doesn’t matter if you put a white rectangle on a white page or set “Print blank spreads” in the booklet-print dialog or not… Or putting something on a layer that you would then set to not print. Indesign doesn’t respond to that and adds empty pages itself anyway.
The solution was to put something very small in a portion of the page that wouldn’t be visible in the printed doscument. For instance: I printed an A5 booklet on A4 paper and put a 0,001mm line right on the edge of the paper, outside of the printable area of my printer.
THEN and ONLY then, could I use the print-booklet function normally.
Appearnatly Indesign CS5 really does need to have something visible on the page, or it will disregard its existence.
Sillyness!
thanks so much! your 2nd point saved me a lot of grief!
Thank you. Blank pages were causing trouble.
Many thanks for this!
It was drivin’ me nuts, while I knew I had the right number of pages, it still kept adding the blank page.
The second option did the trick!
Thanks so much! While I had the option of “print blank pages” selected it still was adding those blasted 2 pages. So until I get to actually adding copy/design to those last few pages I just added a text box with the page number to those empty pages and voila! – it stopped adding those extra two pages!
It’s amazing how much time can be consumed by not making this more obvious in the program. So many people have been pulling their hair out and a simple article like this makes perfect sense! THANK YOU!
Thank you so much!! Print blank pages solved everything :)
So is there no possible way to create a 6 page booklet without any blank pages?
@Dana: How could there be? Take a piece of paper and fold it in half: 4 page (front, inside front, inside back, and back). You could sneak a half-sheet in by hand, but of course your printer cannot do that.
Thank you!!
THANK YOU SOOOOOOOO MUCH!
THANK YOU!
Thank you SO MUCH! I had already been trying to fix my print booklet for an hour, when I stumbled upon this site. THANK YOU!!
THANKS oh my god I’ve been screwing around with this document for two day, tried 3 different printers, InDesign, Acrobat.. Cheers buddy!
Hello!
I have found that every time I print my A5 Booklet the images that look all even in the margins print unevenly consistently.
The image on the right page of a spread looks uneven, to that of the left with a larger margin space to the page.
I have tried printing directly from InDesign and exporting it as a postscript file using distiller and printing that way. Both times I encountered the same issue.
The margins on the page are set, so how can my images that spread to the edge of the margins be printing unevenly on the right page of a spread constantly?!
I also have been having troubles printing the images, with colours coming out very altered. I have used prophoto 16. Bit images that have been saved as Tiff files in my Booklet Document.
Any help at all to what I’m doing wrong, would be very grateful!
you have printed a document and realizaed that the text at the edge of the page is missing.how do you rectify this
Thank you! Divisible by four…so damn stupid. Do you think Adobe could have ONCE mentioned that stupid little detail?
I, for one, always read all of the comments, because one can find the most amazing and unique information.
Thank you! My document was indeed divisible by 4 but it had a blank page… Praise be all the people like you!
I apologize, I know this isn’t the best place for my question; however, I’m working with a book file that I have set up so that each document starts on an odd numbered page (recto). Is there a way to have InDesign insert a blank page at the end of chapters that end on an odd number when I export to PDF, so that the next chapter’s pages will face the correct way when it’s printed?
On the menu of the book panel, choose Book Page Numbering Options …, select ‘Continue on next odd page’ and ‘Insert Blank page’. Should do the trick though this immediately affect the documents you have in the book file and not insert a blank page when you export to PDF. If you still have trouble, I suggest you ask a question in the Forums (link at top of page), where there are lots of folks to help.
This is even better than what I was asking for. Perfect! Thank you, Lindsey.
Thank you.
Most range in size from the head of a pin to a small pea. But remember, do not bee too rash to deal with your warts
with approaches that may end up scarring you for life.
An average of three to four treatments are required for warts of thin skin.
Thank you, you are always very helpful
Hi David. This is slightly off-topic, but I’m struggling for an answer. Is it possible to impose pages using the Print Booklet feature with an InDesign book (INDB)? When I tried the File> Print Booklet command was greyed out. Thanks
Unfortunately, no. The two features don’t work together. The best option is to make a PDF of the whole book and then use an Imposition tool in Acrobat (there are several third-party acrobat add-ons available) to do the imposition.
Thanks, David, much appreciated.