Introduction

They go by many names: playbills, church bulletins, folded pamphlets, brochures, booklets, folded flyers, half-folds, bi-folds, etc. They all share a common folding and printing layout that's tricky to produce with common word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

This tutorial teaches you how to take an ordinary document in sequential page order and arrange the pages to form a folded booklet. That means you can use your favorite word processor or page design tool like Adobe InDesign to design the pages, and then let PDF Snake assemble the booklet.

Goal

The steps in this tutorial will teach you how to take an 8-page document like this:

and create a folded playbill.

1: Save your document as a PDF.

All modern web processors have an option to "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF".

Don't have a document ready? Click the front page below to download the the example PDF.

2: Open PDF Snake.

Click the PDF Snake logo below to open PDF Snake in a new window. Keep this tutorial window and the PDF Snake window open and side by side.

PDF Snake is a tool for imposing. Said another way, PDF Snake imposes pages. "Imposing" means arranging pages in a format that's better for printing.

3: Open the PDF document with PDF Snake.

In the PDF Snake window, click Browse to Begin, then choose the PDF file to be imposed into a booklet. Open.

Your PDF Snake window will look similar to this:

On the left side is the toolbox. This is where we choose imposing tools and settings.
On the right side is the preview. PDF Snake always displays a preview of what the document will look like before you download it. PDF Snake constantly refreshes the preview as you add imposing steps and change settings.