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.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on August 18, 2008
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