How to print notes on fewer sheets (and what that really saves)

Sixty-eight slides for tomorrow’s session. One slide per sheet and the tray is empty before you’re halfway through. A forty-page draft that three people need on paper so they can scribble in the margins. A script you want in your hand instead of on a screen.

None of those need a full sheet per page. Most of them read better at four to a sheet, and the stack you carry out of the printer is a quarter of the height.

reader.me now does the layout for you. Pages per sheet takes a PDF and hands back another PDF with 2, 4, 6 or 9 of the original pages on every sheet. Drop the file, pick the number, download. Your original is untouched.

Pick the number by what the paper is for

The layouts aren’t interchangeable, and the wrong one wastes the printing anyway.

• 2 up. For anything you’re going to read properly. A draft, a chapter, a contract. Each page stays big enough to read at arm’s length, and you halve the stack. This is the safe default and it’s what the tool starts on.
• 4 up. The one for slides. Decks are designed to be legible from the back of a room, so shrinking them to a quarter of a sheet costs you nothing. Four to a sheet turns a 68-slide deck into 17 sheets you can flick through.
• 6 up. Somewhere between reading and skimming. Works for handouts where people mostly need to follow along, or for a set of pages you want to lay out on a desk and compare.
• 9 up. Not for reading. This is for seeing the shape of a document — a contact sheet of every page, so you can spot where the sections start, which pages have tables, which one has the diagram you’re looking for. Storyboards and page plans live here.

If you’re not sure, print one sheet at your chosen layout before you commit the whole document. The preview in the tool shows you the grid, but paper at arm’s length is the real test, especially with small body text.

Turn on the line around each page

There’s a checkbox for drawing a thin line around each page. It’s on by default, and at 6 or 9 up it’s the difference between a usable handout and a grey mess.

The reason is simple: once pages are small and close together, your eye has nothing to tell it where one ends and the next begins. Most PDF pages have white margins, so at 9 up you get a field of white with clumps of text floating in it. The line gives each page an edge, and suddenly the grid reads as a grid.

At 2 up you often don’t need it. The pages are big enough to be obvious on their own, and the frames can look fussy. Try it both ways on the same sheet.

There are also two numbers you can move: the margin around the whole sheet, and the space between pages. Bigger gaps make the grid easier to read but shrink every page. If you’re going to hole-punch or bind the result, push the sheet margin up so the holes don’t eat anything.

Nothing gets stretched

This is the part that’s easy to get wrong and hard to notice until you’re holding the paper.

Each page gets one scale factor, used for both width and height. That means the proportions survive. A page that doesn’t fill its cell exactly gets centred, with the leftover space left as air around it — the page is never pulled sideways to make the edges meet. Stretched text looks subtly wrong in a way most people can’t name but everyone can see, and once it’s on paper there’s no fixing it.

Each page is measured against its own cell, too. If your document mixes A4 portrait with a landscape spreadsheet someone pasted in halfway through, both come out at their correct proportions on the same sheet. No page drags the others down to its size.

What it actually saves

The paper saving is the obvious one and it’s exact: four pages to a sheet is a quarter of the sheets, every time.

Toner is more interesting. It tracks how much of the sheet ends up covered in marks, and shrinking a page to a quarter of its area shrinks the marks along with it, so yes, it drops. Don’t expect it to drop by exactly the same factor, though — printers lay down a minimum for thin strokes and small type, so a page of dense small text won’t scale down as neatly as a page of headings and white space. Somewhere below what you used before, not a quarter of it.

The savings nobody counts: a bound draft that’s a quarter as thick is a quarter as heavy to post, takes a quarter of the shelf, and doesn’t need a second binder clip.

What doesn’t come along

The result is a new document, and it’s honest to say what that costs. Links, form fields, comments and bookmarks from the original don’t survive the move. If you’re printing, none of that matters — paper has never had a clickable link. If you’re planning to keep the montage as your working copy of a form, don’t; keep the original for that.

Text stays text. The pages are embedded, not photographed, so the result is still searchable and you can still copy from it. That surprises people who expect a montage to come out as flat images.

One thing to watch when you send it to the printer: set scaling to 100% or “actual size”. If you let the driver “fit to page” as well, it shrinks an already-shrunk layout and adds a second set of margins, and your 9 up handout comes out unreadable for no reason.

It never leaves your browser

The file is read into memory on your own machine, the sheets are assembled there, and the new PDF saves straight to your downloads. Nothing is uploaded, which matters more than it sounds when the thing you’re printing is a set of student records or exam papers, or a manuscript that isn’t published yet.

If you want to check, turn off your Wi-Fi and do it offline. It still works, because there was never anything to send.