How to print document like a book with Pages?

You could — painfully — manage alternate left/right footers by making every single page the start of a New Section and doing a bunch of copying and pasting of footers. It wouldn't handle document flow well, though (it'd have to be a final step that you undid and then redid if you changed the document).

Uneven left/right margins would require a lot of manual effort. You could use a Stay On Page invisible (no fill or border) rectangular shape with an appropriate Text Wrap setting that you manually placed on alternating sides of each page. Because the page numbers would stay odd/even automatically it would handle document flow ok.

All of which is to say that Pages is no longer a decent double-sided document creation tool. Facing pages is one of the many, many things I'd like back from Pages '09, but I suspect it will never, ever return because print is effectively dead from Apple's perspective. iBooks Author is probably their solution, but it's pretty much abandonware at this point and needs a lot of work.

I'm seriously thinking of exporting as Word and then either doing the facing pages stuff there or importing that into InDesign. Both of which are a bunch more work beyond the hundreds of hours I've spent creating this document full of illustrations, tables, and complex layouts. 😢

There is no facing page option in any release of Pages v5, including v5.6.1. If you still have Pages '09 v4.3 in your Applications : iWork '09 folder, use its capability to provide facing pages from the Document Inspector.

Although Pages no longer supports book style printing. However, you have a couple of options.

1) You can purchase and install Create Booklets, which is a service that will allow you take PDFs created in Pages and impose the pages for book style print.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21068/create-booklet-pdf-service

2) You can get iBooks Author for free from the Mac App Store. IBA supports printing and shouldnfeature imposition.

Hi Macology,

Thanks for that tip about Create Booklet. The advertising blurb sounded good, so I purchased it (the cost is less than a bottle of decent wine 😉).

Here is a test. Screen Shot from Pages 5.6.1

Pages > Print > PDF > Save as PDF. Open the PDF in Create Booklet.

A steep learning curve for me, but I now have a booklet:

If you have any other tips to help Pages users, please post here in the Pages for Mac forum.

Regards,

Ian.

Disclaimer: I gain no benefit from recommending the "Create Booklet" software (apart from the pleasure of helping other Pages users 🙂).

Ian and Macology

Can you let us know what is your trick in Pages 5.6.1 to ensure all odd numbered pages are on the right of the spreads, along with the appropriate left and right footers, page numbers and headers and the necessary centre gutter?

Peter

You wrote:

Can you let us know what is your trick in Pages 5.6.1 to ensure all odd numbered pages are on the right of the spreads, along with the appropriate left and right footers, page numbers and headers and the necessary centre gutter?

I wrote:

A steep learning curve for me

Have you downloaded Create Booklet?

Have you climbed the steep learning curve?

Please call back when you have tested Create Booklet.

You repeatedly palm off either non-solutions or inadequate solutions as if they were real. But GIGO applies.

Please reply when you actually have done any of the things I listed, and show us screensnaps of the results, not token thumbnails.

Peter

btw I spend my money on a bottle of wine not a substitute in a wine bottle.

Ha! You paid for it. I got mine a long while ago for free, and it still works.