Booklet Creator – Great for Bookbinding Printed Documents!

Sounds like an ad but it isn’t. I guess it’s a review?

I book bind by hand, something I’ve talked about before here. It is a pain in the neck to bind printed documents and even worse when it comes to looking up how to do it because online searches assume you mean putting a book in a professional bindery or printing it for official distribution, like a regular book.

The part that makes things tricky is the collation of the pages. In a signature (a batch of folded pages), they have to line up and, well, look like a regular book. But it isn’t that straight-forward when assembling pages for signature printing. Especially since the average book needs several signatures. One sheet of plain printer paper can create four sides, front and back, of pages. With all those pages stacked on top of each other, the pages can become out of order quickly when not checked. And that gets frustrating fast. It’s wasted paper, wasted time, wasted printer ink, everything is a waste.

Sometimes signatures are called “sub-booklets”, which can make internet search difficult because the usual standard name is “signature”. That’s frustrating also.

In the past, I would accomplish this with Blue Squirrel’s program called “Clickbook”. It was good for back then in the past (2015-ish) but now, it’s just too wonky and outdated for me. It may work for others but it doesn’t work for me. I thought Affinity Serif’s Publisher would do signature printing but newp, Affinity isn’t much of a help in that department.

I wound up finally finding Booklet Creator after seeing someone online giving it a try and coming off successful. There’s a trial that limits you to printing 16 pages at a time, which is good enough for if you’re testing out the software, then it is roughly $20 for a forever license (the only good kind of license, none of that month-to-month nonsense).

Things I learned from using Booklet Creator:

Print Odd Pages first unless your printer has super fancy settings. If you are not interested in having a headache in attempt to find out, just print Odd Pages first, and then turn the stack around en masse (long side) and then print Even Pages.

You may want to select “Flip Backs Upside Down (For Duplex Printers)” unless your printer has a built in print-on-both-sides feature built in. Mine doesn’t. This is so when you put the printed pages in again to print on the other side, it comes out the correct way up.

It actually looks pretty good. It’s great for if I want to print out a book and bind it up by hand instead of regular old journals, which does not need a special program because its just lines on a page.