This tutorial walks you through the most common task in Octavo: turning a PDF into a folded booklet. By the end, you’ll understand the basic workflow that applies to everything Octavo can do.
You’ll need a PDF with the pages of your booklet in reading order. It doesn’t matter how many pages you have — Octavo will pad with blanks if the count isn’t a multiple of four.
Open Octavo and create a new document (File -> New). Drag your PDF into the page strip — that’s the thumbnail area across the top of the window. You should see all your pages appear as thumbnails.
If any pages are in the wrong order, drag them around to fix it. You can also delete pages you don’t want, or insert blank pages from the Insert menu.
Click Imposition Type in the sidebar. This is where you tell Octavo what you’re making.
Select Saddle Stitch from the grid of imposition types. This is a regular folded booklet — the kind you’d fold down the middle and staple along the spine.
Leave the finishing mode on Use whole media (to tell Octavo that you won’t be cutting your booklet down to size), and set the Spine Edge to opposite the side you want your booklet to open from.
Click Media in the sidebar. This is where you tell Octavo what paper you’re printing on.
There’s already a Media in the list, so we’ll just modify that one. Set its size to match what’s in your printer — A4, US Letter, or whatever you’re using. Octavo will automatically work out the finished page size from this. For example, A4 paper gives you A5 pages when folded in half.
If you want, you can also tell Octavo which printer you’ll be using. This lets it show you where the printer’s margins are, so you can see if any content will be cut off near the edges.
Click Placement in the sidebar. This controls where your source pages are positioned within the booklet pages.
The default settings (centred, scale to fit, with small margins) work well for most cases. The preview on the right shows you exactly how a page will look — your source content inside the placement margins, on the booklet page.
If your source PDF already has its own margins baked in, you might want to reduce Octavo’s placement margins to avoid doubling up. This is easily done by dragging the handles on the purple dotted line. Just drag them right to the edge of the page.
Before printing, it’s worth checking that everything looks right. The page strip has three modes, chosen via the selector on its right-hand side:
Switch to Imposition mode and click through the sheets. You’ll see that Octavo has rearranged your pages so that when the sheets are printed double-sided, stacked, and folded, everything ends up in the right order.
Click Print in the sidebar to switch to the Print tab. You have two options here: print directly, or export a PDF.
If you didn’t already set your printer in the Media tab, you can select it here.
When you hit the Print button at the bottom of the window, Octavo will print immediately: it sets the paper size to match your media, turns off any scaling, and configures automatic duplex (double-sided printing) if your printer supports it.
Once printed, stack your sheets, fold them in half, and staple the spine. You’ve got a booklet!
If your printer doesn’t support automatic duplex, Octavo can handle manual duplex — printing the front sides first, then the backs as a separate job, with a pause in between for you to flip the paper. Make sure the Duplex: Manual button is selected, and set the options (such as whether you want to reverse the print order for the back sides).
If you’d rather produce a PDF file — perhaps to send to a print shop, print on a different computer, or to keep for archival purposes — use the Export PDF… button and choose Imposed PDF (for printing).
This gives you a PDF with the pages laid out exactly as they’d be printed: rearranged for imposition, placed on your chosen paper size, with any marks included. You can print this PDF from any app and get the same result as printing directly from Octavo — just make sure to print at 100% scale with no “fit to page” scaling.
You’ve now seen the core Octavo workflow: import, choose an imposition style, set up your paper, adjust placement, and print. Every other imposition style — zines, tri-fold brochures, comb binding, and more — follows the same pattern.
A few things you might want to explore next: