Sorry about the ambiguous title. I have a PDF file of A5 pages I'd like to print as a booklet. I have Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat and the rest of CS6 — although I didn't use it to produce the PDF. I don't think that's relevant; PDF is a standard format.
The pages are exactly A5, and I have a printer which can print double-sided A4. Each A5 page and its imposition counterpart will fit exactly on the A4 page, and there is enough of a margin around each page that the actual physical print edge is within that margin. I need each A5 page to be printed at the right size.
My problem is that using Adobe's "Booklet" sizing does odd things with the imposition. Each page has a margin of 10mm on top, left and right, and the print dialog looks like this:
It's added an unprintable area, but within that the margins are even (same left, right, top; double-size in the gutter). That will have the effect of adding the unprintable area to the outer edges of each page of the booklet. The unprintable area is the same all the way round (for an HP M277dw; that seems reasonable).
When that page is actually printed, it looks like this:
Even the printed line length, which was 128mm as designed, has become 122mm.
This happens with every booklet printed with Adobe booklet printing. My printer is set to 100%, so that's not upsetting it. All the pages are the same: the margins on each side are not equal, and the centre fold is not actually in the centre, so it's not creep — if Adobe software is actually capable of calculating that!
I don't believe this is dependent on my system settings, although if someone pipes up saying that Adobe booklet printing will correctly impose 2xA5 on to A4 exactly as designed, then I'd definitely be interested in knowing how that's achieved. Currently it appears that "Print as booklet" is forcing settings which can't be altered.
I can fiddle with the position of the print "block" on the page so that the booklet is at least symmetrical, but is there an easier way of getting A5 PDF pages printed as A4 impositions as I want them, without Adobe thinking it knows better?
(Answers which say "I don't have that problem because I use the Flurble package from Acme Software" are welcome, because that answers the question. I use 64-bit Windows 10.)
