Online Connections


Product:	OpenOffice.org
Component:	Writer
Title:	Producing a brochure or booklet

A brochure or a booklet at first appears easy to produce using any word processor. In actual fact it is harder than you think if the word processor does not support printing a brochure or booklet.

Most people immediately think to use landscape and print two columns. This is fine until you want to print more than two pages.

To show you what I mean, take two A4 pages and put them together. Now fold them in half to create a booklet. On the first page write "Title". Open the booklet and write "blank" on the inside cover. On the right hand side write "page 1". Keep going through the booklet writing "page 2", "page 3", "page 4", "page 5" and then "back" on the back page.

Now take the A4 sheets apart, and look what is written on the pages. The pages are not in the sequence as you first thought they would be.

Now with this knowledge you could create a booklet putting the correct pages in the right places and printing them off. What if you revise what you have written? You would then have to lay it out again.

Using OpenOffice.org this becomes a lot easier. It is still not simple, but it is easier.

First create your document as you would an other document which you would print on A4 pages.

Using the above example of two A4 pages folded, you actually need eight pages of content. They are: Title page, blank page, pages 1 to 5 and the back page.

You are now ready to produce your booklet or brochure. It is all done as part of printing the document.

There is one further trick you need to work out. Brochures are printed on both sides of the A4 sheet, so you need to work out which side of the paper your printer prints on. In my case the printer prints on the side of the sheet facing up in the paper tray. If you don't know, draw a big arrow on a page and put it in the printer facing up and pointing to the back of the printer. Then print something on the page. If your printer prints on the arrow side with the arrow pointing up, you know this is the face of the paper that is printed on. Your printer may print on the back of the sheet.

Now that you know which side of the paper is printed on you are ready to print. Don't be too hard on yourself if you waste a few sheets of paper. Getting this correct requires a bit of thinking. I wasted a few sheets when I first did it.

Unless you have a printer which automatically prints on the reverse side of the page (known as duplex printing) you have to print one side first and then the other side.

In the menu select "File" then "Print". Don't press okay just yet. Click on properties and change the paper to landscape. Now select options and in the pages section, make sure "right" is ticked, "left" is unticked and "brochure" is ticked.

My printer prints the pages and outputs them face down. This means the first page is at the bottom and the blank back of the last page is showing.

For the second side, I simply pick the pages up from the output tray and place them back in the printer tray.

For the reverse side this time use the settings in the options as make sure "right" is unticked, "left" is ticked, "reversed" is ticked and "brochure" is ticked.

The pages come out in the correct order and are ready to fold. You now have a neat A5 size booklet. Notice also that you have not had to think about shrinking the pages down as this is done automatically.

Depending on how your printer outputs the pages and which side of the page your printer prints on, you may need to do some testing yourself to get the right combination.

For running of more than one copy, well I'll leave that up to you to determine the best method.

Some other suggestions when using this approach is that eight papers is a lot of pages. The title page, inside cover and back page don't require too much work. That still leaves five pages. To fill the amount of space available pictures can be added and the font size increased. Borders can be added and margins increased.

In fact, since each original page is reduced automatically, you may want to double the size of the font in the original document anyway, to make it more readable when it is shrunk. To be a little more precise when the document is reduced from A4 to A5 the text is reduced by a factor of 1.414. If you were using a 12 point font and wanted the same size when reduced, you would need to use a font of around 17 point. For some this would be too big. The best approach to to do some testing. Produce a document with text in a couple of different point sizes and then select the one that looks best when the booklet is printed.

Ultimately remember it is the content that is the most important, but good presentation always helps.

We hope this article has been of assistance.

Thanks,

Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.onlineconnections.com.au