Portrait v Landscape?

[ichabod]

In acrobat, not very. To print a folded booklet you need to print the pages out of order if you want to be able to staple the center folds. I do this in Word because on its print dialog it has a line to list what pages to print. So you can say: 32, 1, 30, 3, 28, 5, ... and then flip the pages and say: 2, 31, 4, 29, 6, 27, ... and the result is 16 pages you can fold into a booklet. Acrobat only offers the whole document, the current page and a page range in its print dialog.

Of course, you might do the layout is half pages and then print it to acrobat in the printable order. But I guarentee you will get many confused customers who find it hard to read the book in that order.

That's why I said you would have two versions. One would be the viewable version of two portrait 1/2 pages in side by side landscape view, in the reading order (1 & 2, 3 & 4, ...). The other would be the printable version with the pages in the order to make the 16 sheets that fold into a 64 page booklet (5.5 x 8.5). Then the customer would view one and print the other. And even if the instructions for the booklet were too much for their taste (print this file, flip the pages, print that file, fold and staple), they could print out the readable file. But they would never have to deal with figuring out the page order to print or have to read the pages out of order. That would be dealt with on the production side, and since I make my pdfs from Pagemaker or InDesign, that wouldn't be that hard. So you would have a landscape viewable and small portrait printable, with minimal extra production work.

 

[Capellan]

As a PDF purchaser, if there is only going to be one version of the document in the download, then I prefer landscape to portrait. It's much easier to read on the screen, and no harder (at least for me) to read in print.

 

[PosterBoy]

As a PDF purchaser, if there is only going to be one version of the document in the download, then I prefer landscape to portrait. It's much easier to read on the screen, and no harder (at least for me) to read in print.

RPGObjects has been producing landscape and portrait versions of every release for some time now. Eventually all of our products will have both formats (as we slowly update older products which were all portrait).

-chris

 

[Fast Learner]

Note that InDesign (at least 2.0 and CS) have a very cool feature that will resize and move objects when you change page size or orientation. It has a series of options you can set for what you'd like it to do, as well.

While it doesn't make creating an alternate orientation work-free (as you still have to do some nudging and such), it certainly does 85%+ of the work for you.

Quite cool.