Make booklets and 2-ups with PDF-BatchBooklet

For those of us needing to impose many booklets or 2-ups from single-page PDFs at once, yes, there’s an app for that.

Commissioned by NYC Music Services and developed by the amazing music engraver and font designer Abraham Lee, it’s called PDF-BatchBooklet, and it’s a simple way to take concert-size pages (9”x12”) and impose them on 18”x12” paper, which is my most commonly used scenario.

PDF-BatchBooklet is a desktop app for Mac and PC and it’s available from Notation Central.

Just like PDF-BatchScale, you start off with PDF-BatchBooklet by simply dragging and dropping your files onto the application window, or by clicking the Add button to locate them in your file browser:

There are a a few clever options from which to choose. You can create a traditional booklet by choosing the Folded Booklet Order option. To make a 2-up or other single-sided “accordion” style booklet, choose Straight Page Order.

In addition, there’s an Allow half sheets checkbox. Checking this box in Folded Booklet Order mode will create a double-sided insert on the same size page as the original PDF — you’ll likely need to tape this page into the booklet. Checking the box in Straight Page Order mode will make last page in an odd-numbered PDF to be created on the same size page as the original PDF — in this case, for example, with a 5-page part you’d print pages 1 through 4 on 18”x12” and page 5 on 9”x12”.

There are helpful diagrams to illustrate each mode:

As is the case with PDF-BatchScale, you can optionally add a prefix or suffix to the filename of the newly-generated PDF file that PDF-BatchBooklet creates, and you can specify a new output directory or use the source directory of your original PDFs. Once you click Process Files, your new booklets are created in an instant.

PDF-BatchBooklet is available for both Mac & PC, and it’s available in the Productivity category of Notation Central, our online marketplace for music notation technology.

While it is possible to obtain PDF-BatchBooklet for free, you can support development by naming your own price, which we really appreciate. We suggest $10 — a modest amount, when you think about all of the time it will save you!

And if you like PDF-BatchBooklet, there’s more where that came from:

• PDF-BatchScale, which scales the size of many PDFs at once;
• PDF-BatchStitch, which combines multiple PDFs into one file, along with the option to set the number of copies for any of the PDFs;
• PDF-MusicBinder, an amazing all-in-one app that creates consolidated PDFs for easy printing for either accordion-style layout or stapled imposed booklets.