I've hit several problems with booklet printing, and am wondering if (a) do
MS know about them, and (b) are they going to fix them at any stage.

Word 2003 SP2, on XP pro SP2, working for final output to a QMS330 colour
laser. The work in both cases is order of service prints for weddings, which
are prohibitively expensive from local printers, as they are such small run
sizes. The QMS can handle them quite well, as it's a heavy duty laser
printer, and can cope with A5 up to A3+, and heavy paper as well, so for low
volume work, it's ideal.

Both are printing related problems. The only drawback of the 330 printer is
that it's manual duplex, so I have to put the pages back in to print side 2,
and with the requirement to print 100+ copies of a 16 page A5 size booklet, I
know from experience that it's safer to do them one sheet at a time, then
manually collate them afterwards, as it's too easy to get a mis feed on the
second pass, even with high quality paper.

Therein lies the problem. Print page 1, and it's fine, does the duplex OK,
and I get all the pages in the right places. Then go to print page 3, which
is the first page of the next sheet. I get Page 15, and nothing on the other
3 faces.

OK, it was a pain, but I've got round it by splitting the finished document
into 4 sheets, which I will then print as seperate pages.

I also hit another problem a while back, which was that I was trying to do
some work with A6 pages , double side printing them to A4. It put what I can
only assume were cutting guides on the page, but the problem was that they
were in the wrong place, so I ended up having to do that job on A5, which
fortunately, my laser can handle, and doing a similar thing, split the final
output file into sheets. I looked at every possible printer and document
setting I could find to make sure that margins or borders or other lines or
similar were off, and they all were.

I'm at a loss to understand how something so fundamental to booklet printing
didn't get picked up and fixed long before now, and I'm also surprised that
there's nothing at all about it in the knowledge bases.

Ok, there are ways round it, but they involve a lot more work than should be
needed.

Thoughts, comments and ideas appreciated. I don't do that many of these
types of output, but both of my children wanted decent looking wedding
stationery over the last year, and the prices quoted by local print shops
were out of this world, ( E300 for 150 wedding service booklets which were
basically 4 pages of A4 and a cover, already provided, and we would have
provided machine readable media for the page contents!

So be it, we did the work here instead, at a fraction of the quoted prices,
but the problems outlined above made it a lot harder than it should have been.


--
Steve