MacMost Now 369: Saving Paper with Print Layout

When you print documents from your Mac just to read them away from your desk, you can choose Layout in the print dialog to save paper. You can put 2, 4 or more pages onto one sheet of paper this way. It is handy for long documents and multi-page receipts.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode lets use print layout to save paper. So this is a trick I've been using for years to save paper. Say you want to print out a large document to read away from your computer, could be a webpage, could be a document somebody sent you. Well, you could print one page per one sheet of paper, but sometimes this is over kill. The text is very large. You can actually combine pages onto one sheet of paper, say two pages or fours pages. Let me show you how. So here I have a long article, it's the MacMost article on online password security and you can see its pretty long. But, say you want to print it out to read away from the computer maybe give to a friend. You can print it and if I expand the print area here by clicking on that button. I can see a preview and see that it's going to be nine pages to print out. But, the text is relatively large and if you have good eyes, you may want to actually save paper on this. The way to do that is to go down to this popup here. Which allows you to select what you're looking at in the print dialog, its little bit different for every program. So its going to be a little bit different for every program so its going to be a little different for pages, text edit, Microsoft Word, but its always there. You go to layout, then you get this selection for pages per sheet and say you can combine pages on the sheet and do two per sheet, and you can see here that here in the preview, I actually have a page on the left and a page on the right. So now so instead of nine pages, I'm only printing five and I could go further with that if the text was large enough and do say four or even more per sheet. I can also can the orientation of the page right above there and I can also change the layout direction if i wanted to. Now one thing that may help you also is changing your border. So for instance I see here it looks like pages kind of run into each other a little bit. I can create a single hairline border and you can see now that there is a thin line around each page when I print it out it will be easy to read from page to page. To do the same thing in TextEdit, I have some text pasted into this document here, if I go to print it. Click there and I can see its going to be twelve pages to print but maybe I just want to print this out and take with me on an airplane ride or to class and so I'll go and go to layout, change it to two pages per sheet. I'm going to put a thin line border around them. I could see its only going to take six pages to print out now, saving me half the paper. One thing I use this for all the time is for travel. Say you're out to travel, and you've got your itinerary, you've got you hotel reservation, maybe you've got some information about the conference or whatever it is you're going to. I print it out, and instead of printing out all the pages for it, I'll combine it into two or four pages per sheet. So I'll actually have it, it's very small print, but chances are I wont have to refer to it anywhere or I may just need to get the conformation number off of it. So I feel good that I've got a paper version of all that information in my luggage, but I didn't take up that much paper to print it out. One program you don't have to use this for is iPhoto. It already has functions built in to be able to print multiple pictures per sheet, so use iPhoto's functionality not the print dialogs functionality. Hope you found this useful, til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 369: Saving Paper with Print Layout

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