Put several PDF pages on one sheet

How it works

1. Choose how many to a sheet. Two for a comfortable proof read, four for a handout, nine or sixteen for a contact sheet you are scanning by eye rather than reading. Each doubling of the grid halves the linear size of everything on the page.
2. Leave the orientation on automatic unless you know better. Automatic measures both ways round and picks the one that makes each page bigger, which lands on landscape for two-up and six-up and portrait for four-up and nine-up — the layouts people expect, arrived at by arithmetic rather than a lookup table.
3. Print one sheet and read it. The only real test of an N-up is whether you can read it at arm’s length. If four-up is too small, two-up on the same paper is twice the size; if it is fine, nine-up may be too.

What the options do

The form above lists the options this tool is running today, straight from the server. This is what they are for.

Pages per sheet

The grid: 2 is one column of two, 4 is two by two, 6 is two by three, 8 is two by four, 9 is three by three and 16 is four by four — swapped round when the sheet is landscape. The number tells you the reduction directly: on A4, two-up prints 10 pt body text at about 6 or 7 pt; four-up at about 4; nine-up under 3; and sixteen-up at about 2, which is a thumbnail index rather than something to read. Pages fill the cells in the document’s order, left to right and then down the sheet, and the last sheet is left part-empty rather than padded.

Sheet orientation

Automatic measures how big each page would come out on a portrait sheet and on a landscape one, and takes the larger. For two-up on a portrait document that is landscape, because two portrait pages sit side by side across a turned sheet far better than one above the other. Forcing portrait or landscape is worth it when the sheets have to match the rest of a print run, or go into a binder a particular way round — expect the pages to come out smaller than automatic would have made them.

Draw a thin line around each page

A half-point grey rule around each placed page. Off by default, because a document with its own margins already looks like separate pages. Turn it on for slides, screenshots, artwork that bleeds to the edge, or anything where two neighbouring pages otherwise read as one wide picture. The line is drawn around where the page actually landed, not around the cell, so it shows you the real edge of each page.

What this tool does not do

• This is not booklet imposition. Pages come out in reading order across each sheet — 1, 2, 3, 4 — not in the folded order a saddle-stitched booklet needs, where sheet one carries the first and last pages. A printer’s imposition software does that job.
• Comments, links and form fields are not carried over: each page is placed as a drawing on a larger sheet, and those objects sit beside the drawing rather than in it.
• The sheet size comes from the first page of the document. A file that mixes A4 and A3 gets A4 sheets throughout, with the A3 pages scaled down further to fit their cells. Resize first if you want them treated equally.
• Cells are all the same size and always fill left to right and then down. There is no column-first order, no reverse order, and no way to leave a cell empty or start a section on a fresh sheet.
• The last sheet is not made up to a full grid. Nine pages at four to a sheet gives two full sheets and one carrying a single page.
• It does not set double-sided printing. That is a choice in your print dialogue, not something stored in the file.

What happens to your file

The file is uploaded because N-up PDF runs on our server rather than in the browser tab. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the result you download for 24 hours, then a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

Nothing about the contents is logged, and no one reads your documents. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

Is this the same as booklet printing?

No. A booklet needs pages reordered so that folding the stack produces a readable sequence, which means page 1 sits beside the last page on the outside sheet. This lays pages out in plain reading order for handouts and proofs. If you need a folded booklet, that is an imposition job.

Why did my sheets come out landscape when the pages are portrait?

Automatic orientation turned them, because two portrait pages side by side on a turned sheet come out noticeably bigger than two stacked on an upright one. Force portrait if you need it upright, and accept the smaller result.

How small will the text be?

Two-up roughly halves the linear size, so 10 pt reads as about 6 or 7 pt — comfortable. Four-up is nearer 4 pt, readable but not for long. Nine-up and sixteen-up are for recognising pages, not reading them.

My printer can already do this. Why use a file?

Because the file is the same everywhere. A print dialogue setting lives on one machine and one driver; an N-up PDF is what you email to somebody, attach to a bundle, or hand to a print shop, and it will look identical on their equipment.

Can I change which pages land where?

Only by changing the document. Reorder it first — putting the pages in the order you want them to appear, repeating one or dropping one — and then lay them out. The cells are filled strictly in document order.