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Do MS have any plans to fix booklet printing?
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 |
#2
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Do MS have any plans to fix booklet printing?
I agree that booklet printing in Word 2002 and 2003 is problematic, starting
with the fact that Inside and Outside margins are reversed and continuing with the major problem of printing specific pages. The "cutting guides" you experienced are probably the same as the unwanted "page borders" or "outlines" other users have reported. I don't know whether this feature will be improved in Office 12 or not, but I would certainly hope so. Although booklet printing was a much-requested feature, I suspect that MS has not gotten enough feedback on it to be fully aware of how badly the current implementation sucks. FWIW, I still do most of my booklets using the instructions detailed at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...etPrinting.htm, but I don't attempt to produce finished duplex booklets; I just print "camera-ready copy" (single-sided) and have them reproduced either by photocopying or by offset printing. One other approach you might try is creating a PDF from the booklet and then printing that to your printer. Also, you might check your printer Properties to see if the printer driver offers a built-in booklet feature. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Steve Garry" sgarry@simpilotdotnet wrote in message ... 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 |
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