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I am designing a booklet: the print house needs the two sides of the booklet to be on a single PDF page. When exporting the PDF from Scribus, I found a way to make it such that PDF viewers display the pages side by side (Viewer -> Display settings -> Document Layout -> Double Page Left), but the actual PDF still contains the pages 1:1.

In essence, I'd like to export the PDF such that the document which looks like this in Scribus: layout

contains two pages AB CD, instead of four pages A B C D

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  • Do you have an export in "Spreads" option?
    – Alith7
    Aug 20, 2020 at 17:26
  • @Alith7 unlikely, I don't know where to find this "Spreads" option. I'm trying to google for it, but all the relevant results seem to point to the forums, which appear to be down right now. I'll try using the archive
    – Francesco Bertolaccini
    Aug 20, 2020 at 17:32
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    You shouldn't have to do this. Usually a printer should be able to do the imposition for you. If they can't, then find a printer who can.
    – Billy Kerr
    Aug 21, 2020 at 10:12
  • @BillyKerr That's easier said than done, unfortunately. The booklet in question is for a CD jewel case, so the printer in question needs to be able to print the booklet, the CD, the tray lining and everything. The options in my area are not many, and all of them give the same-ish templates with the pages already spread out and in the "booklet order"
    – Francesco Bertolaccini
    Aug 21, 2020 at 13:02

2 Answers 2

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You may not be able to. I'm not familiar with Scribus, but in looking at the output settings, it doesn't look like that is in a option. You may need to manually create your document to do that.

So if your final size is 8.5x11, you will need to make your document 17x11.

I would also maybe look into using a different printer. They should easily be able to put your PDF into printer spreads. We don't even accept PDF's as spreads anymore, they must be single pages, and our imposition software puts them together.

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    I can confirm what @Alith7 wrote: Scribus cannot do that. And he/she is right that you need to create a new document of the target size and copy paste the content into there. And I also can confirm that you should try to change the printer: if they can't correctly print a PDF that is made for printing, you will probably face other issues in the future.
    – a.l.e
    Aug 22, 2020 at 9:09
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As above, I don't think Scribus can do this, the printer should be able to cope with two pages. They only reason I think you should be able to do this, is in order to quickly convert to fixed layout ebooks. InDesign will do this.

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  • In the end, I ended up using InDesign to design the whole booklet, then using an external utility which generates the booklet spreads
    – Francesco Bertolaccini
    Aug 28, 2020 at 11:48

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