N-up printing places several document pages onto one sheet. This tool does 2-up: two consecutive pages side by side on a single A4 sheet in landscape orientation, halving the paper a document needs.
It is the standard way to print slide decks as handouts, to produce a reading copy of a long report without killing a ream, and to review a layout where facing pages need to be seen together. Combined with double-sided printing it cuts a hundred-page document down to twenty-five sheets.
Crucially, the pages are placed using pdf-lib’s page embedding rather than being rendered to images. Vector text stays vector text, so a 2-up sheet prints just as crisply as the original at its reduced size, and the text remains selectable in the output file.
The imposition is done in your browser. Slide decks and internal reports are rearranged locally without being uploaded.
-edited suffix.| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Sheet size | A4 landscape, 841.89 × 595.28 points |
| Pages per sheet | 2, side by side in reading order |
| Scaling | Proportional, fitted to the larger of width or height |
| Margin | 24 points around each placed page |
| Alignment | Centred within its half |
| Odd page count | The final sheet carries one page and a blank half |
Two A4 portrait pages on one A4 landscape sheet means each is reproduced at roughly seventy percent of its original linear size. Body text set at 11 points therefore prints at about 8 points, which is small but comfortably legible for most readers.
Slide decks are the ideal input, since presentation type is large to begin with and loses nothing at this scale. Dense documents with footnotes in 8-point type are the opposite case — those footnotes end up near 6 points and become genuinely hard to read.
Not currently. This tool does 2-up only. For 4-up, run it twice: the output of the first pass has two pages per sheet, and running that through again gives four.
Yes. Pages are embedded as PDF content rather than rasterised, so vector text is scaled mathematically and prints at your printer’s full resolution. It also stays selectable in the output file.
A4 in landscape, 841.89 by 595.28 points, regardless of the input page size. Source pages are scaled proportionally to fit their half.
The final sheet holds the last page on the left and leaves the right half blank, which is the conventional result.
Almost certainly your print dialog is set to “fit to page”, which shrinks the already-imposed sheet a second time. Choose actual size or 100% instead.
No. pdf-lib performs the imposition inside your browser.