Printing A6 on A4 paper

Question

Yesterday I encountered a problem with printing an A6 pdf document (which I created using LaTeX). The Printing shop did not have A6 sheets, so they took the print out on an A4, which turned out different than what I expected it to – it was magnified in the print.

I have few questions to ask, please help me out:

1. Is it possible to put A6 page with border, so I could get printout of any sized paper, and then cut it using the border?

2. Can I put multiple (x,y) on (a,b) paper? Here paper size is mention with this convention (width, height) and (a,b) bigger than (x,y). As show in the image below. Ex: 6 orange-size sheets on one green-size sheet, with border for cutting the paper into A6 after the printing?

3. Is it possible to arrange smaller sheets in any order on a bigger sheet? Like consecutive sheets row wise or column wise? Below I have mentioned the page numbers and arrangement.

(1, 2, 3)      (1, 4, 7)
(4, 5, 6)  or  (2, 5, 8)
(7, 8, 9)      (3, 6, 9)

Answer 1

The pdfpages package provides exactly this functionality.

Assume that you have a document that has been created in LaTeX on A6-sized paper (the example below creates a 29-page document, mya6doc.pdf say):

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage[english]{babel}%
\usepackage[a6paper]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\begin{document}
\chapter{First chapter} \lipsum[1-10]
\chapter{Second chapter} \lipsum[11-20]
\chapter{Third chapter} \lipsum[21-30]
\chapter{Final chapter} \lipsum[31-40]
\end{document}

Now create another document mya4doc using the following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}%
\usepackage[a4paper]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{pdfpages}% http://ctan.org/pkg/pdfpages
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-,nup=2x2,frame,noautoscale]{mya6doc}%
\end{document}

pdfpages options allow for the inclusion of all pages (pages=-) in a 2x2 nup format (nup=2x2) with a border¹ around each page (frame). Also, pages are left unscaled (noautoscale).

The default is to print pages using a row-first ordering. The can be modified to print using a column-first ordering³ by adding the option column:

Note that in the above example, nup=2x2 was used since A6 is 1/4 of A4. Therefore, the inserted pages remain exactly A6 and snugly fit side-by-side on A4. However, it is also possible to put 6 A6 pages on a A4 sheet, since pdfpages automatically scales the input pages to fit on the output pages (or any number² for that matter). The inserted pages will be reduced in size accordingly. For example, modifying the above to

\includepdf[pages=-,nup=2x3,frame,delta=2cm 0]{mya6doc}%

produces a 3x2 layout with a horizontal gap of 2cm between the inserted pages (and zero vertical gap):

The package documentation provides the rest of the options.

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¹ Satisfies your first request.

² Satisfies your second request.

³ Satisfies your third request.

Answer 2

1. Paper border and printing one size on a larger-sized paper: You can use the crop package.

   • See also the answer Draw true page border
   • Download: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/crop

2. and 3. are probably best done with psnup or pdfnup.

   • pdfnup (part of pdfjam): http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam
   • psnup: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ajcd/psutils/psnup.html

All those software packages are open source and usually installed on any Linux system. On Windows or Mac you can probably download a proper version, too.

If pdfnup does not fit your wishes, pdftk is another open source PDF package that can be very helpful: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/