Printing a PDF as handouts with several pages on each sheet
A slide deck to hand out at a meeting, a long draft to proofread on paper, or a reference you want to carry as a few sheets instead of forty: in each case the pages are fine as they are, there are just too many of them. Putting several on each sheet keeps every page whole and uses a fraction of the paper.
Updated
Which tool you need
Slides as handouts, or a draft to proofread on paper
Multiple Pages per Sheet. Two or four to a sheet keep normal type readable; six or nine suit slides with large text.
Every page onto A4 or US Letter, one page on each sheet
PDF to A4 resizes each page to the paper without putting several together.
The pages need reordering or removing before they are combined
Organize PDF puts the pages in the order you want; combine the result afterwards.
Wide white margins would make each small page smaller still
Trim them off with Crop PDF first. The cropped area is what gets placed, so the content fills more of each spot on the sheet.
A booklet to fold in half and staple
That needs pages placed out of order so they read correctly once folded, which this tool does not do; it places pages in reading order only.
How the pages are arranged
Two pages sit side by side on a landscape sheet or one above the other on a portrait one; four, six, eight and nine form grids of two by two, three by two, four by two and three by three, turned to suit the sheet. On Automatic, the orientation is picked once for the whole document, whichever lets the first page be drawn larger, so every sheet of a handout matches; portrait and landscape can also be set by hand.
The order can run across and then down like reading text, down each column first, or across from the right for documents read right to left. Margins can be none, about 6 mm or about 13 mm, applied around the edge and between the pages, and a thin gray border can be drawn around each one.
What the combined sheets keep
Each page is placed as itself rather than as a picture of itself, so text stays selectable and photos keep their resolution. It is scaled to fit its spot with its shape kept and centered there, so a page that is a different shape from the spot gets white space rather than being cut.
Comments, stamps, signatures and filled-in form fields are drawn onto the sheets as they look, but they can no longer be edited. Links stop working, a comment saved without a drawn appearance of its own is left off, and bookmarks have no pages left to point at; the result counts the links and comments left behind. The document's title and author do carry over.
What to know before you start
- Nine to a sheet draws each page about a third as wide as the sheet, which small type may not survive in print.
- Comments and filled-in form fields are drawn on and no longer editable; links stop working.
- No booklet or fold-and-staple layouts.
- When the page count does not divide evenly, the final sheet is partly blank rather than its pages enlarged.
- A password-protected PDF needs Unlock PDF before its pages can be combined.