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I have a document which will print on a single sheet of A4 paper. I want to produce multiple copies of this at the A5 size. I wish to do this by printing two copies of each page per A4 sheet. Then later I shall manually trim the A4 sheets in half, creating the A5 handouts that I desire.

How can I make this happen with the Print dialog?

I am using an HP Envy 5540 printer.

At present the best I can do is to print on the 2-pages-per-sheet setting (which does the shrinking to A5) but I only get one copy (thus wasting half a sheet of paper each time).

Here is an example where the right half of the page comes out blank:

When I tried some sensible advice given by an answer below, I unfortunately got the same result. Here is what I selected:

enter image description here

enter image description here

enter image description here

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6 Answers 6

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There is a general work around you can try.

Specify a custom set of "Pages to Print" and enter your desired page twice. i.e.: "1,1"

Then print "2 Pages per sheet".

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  • 1
    Does not work if there is only one page in the document. Some mouth-breathing nimrod at Microsoft decided that the UI for entering page numbers and ranges should be inaccessible if the document has only one page.
    – Kaz
    Mar 19, 2023 at 18:33
  • This technique doesn't work when printing from Google Chrome, nor does it work if your original document is only a single page. But it does seem to work if you first save your document as a PDF (with more than 1 page) and then print from Adobe Reader using this technique of "Pages: 1,1".
    – Simon E.
    Feb 11 at 2:50
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The trick is to think 'print pre-processing': First print job is to concatenate the pages you want. use one of the many 'print to pdf' printers. Windows 10 has one installed from Microsoft. An alternative is 'DoPDF'. With this print-to-pdf you can best create one or two pages full. In your case 4 times.

Next, open the created pdf-document and print that using the multiple pages on a single page from your printer.

My job was similar: I wanted some business cards. I created one on A4 size. I printed that 16 times to a pdf document. My printer now prints that 16 pages on a sheet. Et Presto!

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  • Both stages can now be done with Adobe Acrobat Reader DC
    – Gruber
    Aug 18, 2020 at 19:13
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    @Gruber How did you achieve it in Adobe Acrobat Reader? I've tried several things, none of which appear to work.
    – Simon E.
    Feb 11 at 2:46
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In Windows standard print dialog: enter image description here

In MS Word print settings:

enter image description here

In Adobe Acrobat Reader:

enter image description here

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  • See my feedback to your kind assistance, with screenshots, in the updated version of the question. Oct 9, 2018 at 14:23
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    From your expanded question I can see that you are having a genuine problem there. First of all I advice to start experimenting by printing into PDF (to save paper) until you get the result you want. And only once you have sorted printing to file you can proceed. Oct 9, 2018 at 14:52
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Assuming you are printing from the image file (JPEG, PNG, ...). Trye creating two copies of the same file in a directory. Select both and choose Print. Then repeat the same process you were doing in your screenshots with the same settings.

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None of the other answers worked for me on Windows, but I came up with a fully working solution that unfortunately requires a Macintosh computer nearby:

  1. Save your document as PDF on your Windows machine
  2. Transfer the PDF file to your Mac (for instance with a USB thumb drive)
  3. Open the PDF in Preview
  4. Use File -> Print. In the dialog, locate the Copies per page setting and set it to 2,4 or whatever suits you
  5. Click PDF -> Save as PDF.
  6. Transfer the resulting PDF file to your Windows machine.
  7. Open the PDF, print it, and voilá!
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I had a single page PDF document that I wanted to shrink, printing multiple copies on one page. Because the document has only one page, Microsoft's printing dialog would not let me enter pages or page ranges: the 1,1,1 trick was not applicable.

Having Gimp installed on the computer. I did this:

  1. Open the PDF document in Gimp, using the one-layer-per-page discipline. Since there is only one page, it doesn't matter.
  2. Dupilcate the layer three times to create four identical layers (if the goal is a 4x4 print; otherwise more).
  3. Export the image to PDF again, specifying that each layer becomes a PDF page. Now you have a PDF document with multiple copies of the original page.
  4. Open with PDF viewer again and print using multiple pages per sheet.

I expect this trick will work with multiple pages also. E.g. if we had a three page document each of whose pages we wanted to print in quadruplicate on a single sheet, we could open it as a three-layer image in Gimp, then duplicate each of the layers, ensure they are in the right order and save as PDF.

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