Put several PDF pages on one sheet

Putting several pages on one sheet is how a fifty-page deck becomes a handout you can read on a train, and how a long document becomes something you can print without emptying a paper tray. Printer drivers call it N-up and most of them can do it, but only at the moment of printing, only on that machine, and never in a form you can send to somebody else. FileGizmo produces the laid-out document itself, in your browser, as a PDF you keep.

The grids

Two, four, six, nine, or sixteen pages per sheet. Each is a real grid rather than a number: two is side by side, four is two by two, six is three across and two down, nine is three by three, and sixteen is four by four. Six is the one that no formula produces and the one people most often want for a slide handout.

The sheet takes its size from the pages it carries, turned on its side when the grid is wider than it is tall. Two portrait pages side by side belong on a landscape sheet; four of them belong on a portrait one. Fixing the output to A4 instead would letterbox every document that is not A4, which is most of the documents anyone puts through a tool like this — slides are rarely A4, and neither are US Letter pages.

Pages are placed in reading order: left to right, then down. Each is scaled to fit its cell and centred in it, keeping its proportions, so a mixed document whose pages are not all the same size still lays out sensibly instead of stretching.

Nothing is rasterized

Each page is embedded and drawn as a scaled vector page, not as a picture of one. Text stays selectable and searchable in the result, links inside the page content stay intact, and vector artwork stays sharp at any zoom. The file does not balloon the way it would if every page had been turned into an image at print resolution.

That is also what makes the result useful as a document rather than only as something to print. A four-up handout you can search is a different object from a four-up handout you can only look at.

Gaps and edges

By default the pages meet with no gap, which puts the maximum amount of document on each sheet. A small or medium gap adds space around and between the cells, which is worth having when the pages have content running close to their own edges and you want the boundary between one page and the next to be visible.

If the page count does not divide evenly by the grid, the last sheet carries whatever is left, in the same positions, and the remainder of the sheet stays empty. That is deliberate: shifting the last few pages to centre them would put them in different grid positions from every other sheet, which is exactly the thing that makes a handout hard to follow.

What to check

Look at the result before you print a hundred copies. Scaling four pages onto one sheet makes the text a quarter of the size, and a document set in nine-point type does not survive that on paper even though it reads perfectly on screen. Two or four per sheet is usually the limit for something meant to be read; nine and sixteen are contact sheets, useful for finding a page rather than reading one.

The original file on your disk is untouched, so if the grid is wrong you can change it and build the sheets again.