My friend Dave has just moved across to mac and he tells me that in Microsoft publisher you can use a booklet template to make a booklet. By booklet I mean A4 pages folded in half to make an A5 booklet that you staple in the middle. To do this all the pages need to be re-ordered, for example, page 8 goes near page 1, page 2 near page 7 and so on. Publisher did this automatically.

With Pages in OS X there is no such built in option to do this automatically, but there is a great little program called ‘create booklet’ that will do it for you when you go to print the document.

You need to download a little program called ‘Create Booklet’ to do it. You can download it directly from here or go to the webpage here.

After you’ve downloaded it, Click on the ‘install- Create Booket PDF Service’
This will install an extra menu item in your printer menu to be able to print booklets.

After you’ve done this, go into Pages and select print, like you are going to normally print a document. But instead of pressing print (in the bottom right corner of the window) select the ‘PDF’ button in the bottom left, and click on ‘Create Booklet’

Your document will automatically be made into a booklet. It will open in a new window, and you can either ‘save’ it as a PDF file (to email to someone or print out later) or you can print it as a booklet to your printer.

Just remember that when you are designing a booklet, it will be printed smaller than usual. The A4 page you see on your screen will be printed on 1/2 an A4 page when you make a booklet, so make all the text a bit bigger than usual. Eg use a 16 point font instead of 12.

Note: There was an application called ‘Cocoa Booklet’ that used to do this but it doesn’t work in Snow Leopard, this is the new way of doing it.

Note: If you want to publish a book, and need a more professional binding solution try this program (it’s not free).