what the actual fuck is Apple Pages’s booklet printing

[solarbird]

holy hell what even is apple pages’s “booklet” mode printing because it sure as hell isn’t for printing booklets.

i mean, it’s literally, completely, totally wrong and broken. as far as I can tell absolutely nothing about it is actually correct or actually works.

did they literally never try this? did they never once try to print a folding booklet and then actually try to fold it?

not once?

BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. IT DOESN’T WORK. AT ALL.

[okay let’s back up for a minute, breathe…]

So. If you’re going to print double-sided so you can make a proper folded booklet, you cannot just print the pages two per side in linear order, 1-2-3-4 left to right, front to back.

Why not?

BECAUSE THAT’S NOT HOW TOPOLOGY WORKS IS WHY.

But that’s what Apple Pages does. Following their directions, that’s what you get. that’s just what happens.

(not to mention that apparently Pages “page” size and “printer paper” size are always the same – there’s no way to set only one, if you change the size of the paper in your printer your page layout size also changes – so if you want to make a decent folding booklet you’re screwed there too.)

oh did I mention print preview is almost always wrong? BECAUSE IT IS. AND…

[breathe, breathe…]

Right. Okay. Let’s say you’ve got an eight page booklet. You want to print two pages per side, both sides of the paper, on two sheets of paper. One fold, and you have a booklet.

What Pages wants to do is print pages in linear order left to right, on the front and back of each sheet of paper.

sheet 1, front: page 1 | page 2
sheet 1, back: page 3 | page 4

sheet 2, front: page 5 | page 6
sheet 2, back: page 7 | page 8

Now, there’s UI to change the order within a single sheet of paper. Not across two sheets! Just one. You’ll see why that’s a problem in a minute, but let’s play with it first.

If you select that UI and change the page placement on the paper, the print preview will redraw to reflect your selection.

If you then print the document, Pages will then fuck off and print what it wanted to print to begin with. And even though you see that “duplex printing” is in fact clearly checked, it doesn’t print double sided, it prints all the pages single-sided because fuck you is why.

Regardless.

Now pretend it did print double-sided and take those two sheets of paper in your head – or grab a couple of sheets of paper and write big page numbers on them like the above – and try to fold it into a booklet with the pages in order.

YOU LITERALLY CAN’T. NOTHING WORKS. You can’t even put the COVER in the COVER POSITION. It’s ALL wrong. The VERY FIRST PAGE is wrong! I…

[breathe]

I keep thinking “there has to be a user case where this makes some kind of sense.” But I am not seeing it.

Apple owned desktop publishing for decades. How the fuck did they get to this?

I mean, I grabbed the downloadable “printer friendly” version of this document and it was a clown car very much like this clown car. I’m kind of wondering if it was, in fact, generated by this clown car. But I didn’t know about this clown car yet, and once I had the document, I thought, “well, this is a mess but what do you expect, nobody knows how page layout works any more, I’ll load it into… I know, I’ll try Pages… and fix it. Apple knows page layout.”

APPARENTLY THEY FUCKING DON’T KNOW PAGE LAYOUT ANYMORE BECAUSE

…

Right. Okay. Calm.

So if you’re wondering, here’s how you print an 8-page double-sided booklet to make it fold together properly on two sheets of paper:

sheet 1, front: page 8 | page 1
sheet 1, back: page 2 | page 7

sheet 2, front: page 6 | page 3
sheet 2, back: page 4 | page 5

Put those on top of each other, page one on top, make one (1) fold where you’d expect, et volia, you get a lovely eight-page booklet with all the pages in order and the cover on the front.

But instead, we have this bullshit.

jfc what even the fuck happened to you, Apple. You used to own this.

eta

oh christ it keeps getting better by which I mean worse

So. I made a one-up PDF and manually rearranged all the pages to be in the right magic order even when printed their STUPID FUCKING IDIOT way.

Now this document I’m working on was designed for a printing to half-pages of US letter, right? It’s a booklet. That’s what you do. So that’s how I set it up.

this means that if you look at a single page on US letter the aspect ratio is wrong. you’ve go unused white areas on the sides.

but if you put two of these pages on the same physical page, you can fill the entire half-sheet of paper with each document page and it all fills perfectly, even the two-page spreads.

BUT NOT IF APPLE HAS ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT. THIS IS BROKEN TOO.

And the best part is HOW broken it is, and in what ways, is ORDER OF OPERATIONS DEPENDENT.

So. If you’re in one-up mode (one page per side of paper) and change the print scaling to “fill paper” in anticipation of going to two-pages-per-side mode, you’ll see that the top and bottoms of the pages are cut off in single-page mode. That’s because the page you’re trying to print is narrower than US Letter, and to get to the full width of the page, the top and bottom of the image get cut off. The page is too tall.

But that’s okay. You’re not actually printing to US Letter paper, at least, not one page to one side. All the missing parts will come back once you’re printing two document per sheet, because that’ll give you the right aspect ratio for the pages and all the paper you need to fill the sheet like you want.

EXCEPT THEY DON’T COME BACK. THEY DON’T. THEY’RE CUT OFF EXACTLY WHERE THEY WERE CUT OFF ON SINGLE-PAGE MODE EVEN THOUGH THERE’S ALL THE PAPER IN THE WORLD RIGHT THERE READY TO USE.

It just arbitrarily cuts off the tops and the bottoms of the pages for you, because, again, fuck you is why.

but wait, my story gets even worse

so you think okay, I’ll go ahead into two-pages-per-side-of-paper mode first, then enlarge the images there.

except

except

except

not only does that not fix it

it changes the behaviour! FOR THE WORSE!

You still get the tops and bottoms cut off, but for some space alien reason, it also throws one of the pages ALMOST ENTIRELY OFF THE SHEET OF PAPER TO THE RIGHT. Look!

Why?

BECAUSE FUCK YOU IS WHY AND ALSO YOU CAN’T FIX IT UNDO DOESN’T WORK CHANGING THE SETTING BACK DOESN’T WORK YOU HAVE TO START OVER AGAIN BECAUSE NO REALLY FUCK YOU IS WHY.

I guess.

I mean…

what do you even do.

I’m almost not even mad.

I mean, I am mad. I really am.

But I’m that kind of “mad” that is also “amazed” because holy shit. This much broken… it’s… it’s kind of impressive.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.