[Tutorial] Creating a Brochure with Writer
Posted: Sun May 31, 2009 1:17 pm
In this tutorial, I make a distinction between sheets and pages. A sheet is a sheet of paper, a page is a logical page within your document. Pages are printed on sheets. And in the case of the brochure, four pages are printed on each sheet, two pages per side.
Pick up a brochure and flick though it and look at its construction. You’ll see that it isn’t as straightforward as you might have thought. Yes, it is a collection of landscape sheets, folded and stapled, but look at a single sheet.
The pages that are printed on the sheets (apart from the center pages) are not consecutive. In a 36 page brochure for example, the sheet that has page 6 on it (on the left) has page 31 on the right of it. And on the back of that same sheet you have page 5 on the right and page 32 on the left. Working out this layout for a large document can be both confusing and time consuming. The good news is that OOo will take care of the arrangement of the pages for you, automatically. You simply compose your document in the logical page order of 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, and let OOo worry about putting them in the correct order for printing.
I’m going to talk in terms of metric page sizes because I’m in Europe and it’s what I’m familiar with, but the same principles work equally well for imperial paper. I’m going to discuss the production of an A5 size brochure. That is, it will have A5 portrait pages printed two-up on A4 landscape sheets.
There’s two ways to achieve this layout. One way is have the document page size formatted to A4. At print time, OOo will automatically scale everything, reducing your A4 pages so that that two of them will fit on the printed sheet. It also juggles them and places them in the appropriate order on landscape A4 sheets so that when printed and collated and stapled they read in the correct order, front cover through to back cover.
The second method is to resize the pages within your document to A5 and compose and edit them in that page size. At print time OOo will again place them in the appropriate order on landscape A4 sheets but it will not need to reduce them in size, because two A5 sheets are exactly the same size as a sheet of A4. The advantage here is that it is What You See Is What You Get – the font sizes you use are the font sizes that will be used in the printed version.
Working in A4 and having the pages auto-reduced by OOo means you have to compensate by working in a larger than usual font to ensure that the final text is still readable once it has been reduced. For example to have an (approximately) 12 size font in the brochure you’d need to work in 14 font in the document.
I want to have a brochure with no numbers on the front or back cover, so I’m going to modify and use the First page style for those pages. I will use the Default style for the internal pages of the document, so I will modify the Default style to meet my needs.
Here’s how we do it.
Pick up a brochure and flick though it and look at its construction. You’ll see that it isn’t as straightforward as you might have thought. Yes, it is a collection of landscape sheets, folded and stapled, but look at a single sheet.
The pages that are printed on the sheets (apart from the center pages) are not consecutive. In a 36 page brochure for example, the sheet that has page 6 on it (on the left) has page 31 on the right of it. And on the back of that same sheet you have page 5 on the right and page 32 on the left. Working out this layout for a large document can be both confusing and time consuming. The good news is that OOo will take care of the arrangement of the pages for you, automatically. You simply compose your document in the logical page order of 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, and let OOo worry about putting them in the correct order for printing.
I’m going to talk in terms of metric page sizes because I’m in Europe and it’s what I’m familiar with, but the same principles work equally well for imperial paper. I’m going to discuss the production of an A5 size brochure. That is, it will have A5 portrait pages printed two-up on A4 landscape sheets.
There’s two ways to achieve this layout. One way is have the document page size formatted to A4. At print time, OOo will automatically scale everything, reducing your A4 pages so that that two of them will fit on the printed sheet. It also juggles them and places them in the appropriate order on landscape A4 sheets so that when printed and collated and stapled they read in the correct order, front cover through to back cover.
The second method is to resize the pages within your document to A5 and compose and edit them in that page size. At print time OOo will again place them in the appropriate order on landscape A4 sheets but it will not need to reduce them in size, because two A5 sheets are exactly the same size as a sheet of A4. The advantage here is that it is What You See Is What You Get – the font sizes you use are the font sizes that will be used in the printed version.
Working in A4 and having the pages auto-reduced by OOo means you have to compensate by working in a larger than usual font to ensure that the final text is still readable once it has been reduced. For example to have an (approximately) 12 size font in the brochure you’d need to work in 14 font in the document.
I want to have a brochure with no numbers on the front or back cover, so I’m going to modify and use the First page style for those pages. I will use the Default style for the internal pages of the document, so I will modify the Default style to meet my needs.
Here’s how we do it.