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bfuchsFlag for United States of America

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Printing several PDF files at once.

Hi Experts,

I'm looking to print several PDF files 4 in a page, like they would be one big file, how can I do it?

Thanks
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Dr. Klahn

Do you want to print one file 4 up, or four files in a 4 up format?

If you have, say, 3 files with 8 pages and 1 file with 500 pages and it is printed four files 4 up, that will waste a lot of paper.
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hdhondt
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Printing "4 in a page" from Acrobat Reader :

In the Print menu select the paper size and orientation (Paper size from the "Page setup" button and Orientation from the radio button on the main print dialogue page)

To print multiple pages of your document click the "Multiple" button.  This defaults to 2 x2 pages from your document per page.

Depending on the maximum size of paper your printer supports you could print 4 x A4 pages full size on one piece of A2 paper but provided the document remains legible you can simply print 4 pages to one A4 sheet (Each being A6 size).
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ASKER

@hdhondt,

It looks like your suggestion would work, although I would prefer selecting an entire folder and not each individual file separately...(guess this is whats avail for free-:).

However just one minor issue, how can I adjust the file/page size it should use all the blank spaces between the docs (play around with margins..)?

See attached.

Thanks,
Ben
Untitled.png
@bfuchs
That's exactly what PDF-TKBuilder does. When you run it, you select files (including all files in a folder, or multiple folders) to combine. Then you click "Save As", specify a file name, and it saves all of them as 1 single PDF. Look at the link I gave.

I don't understand your question about blank spaces. The following is a guess.

If you mean what happens when a PDF includes blank pages, PDF-TKBuilder will faithfully include those blank pages - unless you first remove them. This can also be done with PDF-TKBuilder, but in a roundabout way. A better way would be to use my favourite PDF viewer, PDF-Xchange Editor to delete the blank pages and then re-save the PDF. Unfortunately both of these methods would need to be done for each file individually.

EDIT
I just realised you attached a screenshot. From that it does look as if you are talking about page margins. Unfortunately, each PDF page has margins built-in, so they cannot be removed. You can play around with the printer margins or possibly scaling. As scaling operates from the bottom left corner, it will tend to shift the image out of sight. Note also that Acrobat (and PDF-Xchange Editor) know the printer's available print area, and will not print outside that - even if what needs to be printed there is blank space. The only way to remove the page margins is with a PDF editor, but that will be labour-intensive as it needs to be done for every page of every PDF. For example, in PDF-Xchange Editor you can use the "Crop page" function.
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Thank you!