You can then just print that using Preview as follows: It produces a new PDF on your Desktop with appropriately shuffled pages. It’s an Automator script which you can run as a service: once installed, you can right-click on a PDF and select Services, and you should find a ‘Make Booklet PDF’ option. So here’s my solution, which could be a lot tidier, but does the only tricky bit of the job: getting the pages in the right order. Now, there are utilities you can buy which can do exactly this, but why would I spend a tenner or two when I could instead use a few otherwise lucrative working hours and build one myself?

My HP printer driver had a ‘booklet’ facility, and it worked OK for 8 pages, but let me down when given any more. Unfortunately, you need to print page 39 on the same page as page 10, and then pages 40 and 9 on the other side, etc, and when you get to anything more than about 4 pages it’s hard and tedious to do this by hand and get it right. I had a 47-page PDF document that I wanted to turn into a compact A5 booklet – you know, one of those things where you get out the big stapler and make something like this:

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