How to print a long PDF without wasting half a ream

You need a physical copy of a long document — a manual to annotate, a bundle for a meeting, a draft easier to read on paper than on screen. Sent straight to the printer it consumes an alarming stack, and most of it is margin.

There are four independent savings available, and used together they routinely reduce a document to a quarter of its printed size while remaining perfectly readable.

One: print only what you need

The largest saving is usually the simplest. Long documents carry cover pages, blank separators, tables of contents, appendices and distribution lists, and you rarely need all of it on paper.

Decide which pages actually matter before printing, and either enter that range in the print dialog or extract those pages into a smaller document first. Extracting is worth the extra step when you will print it more than once, or when someone else needs the same subset.

Two: two pages per sheet

Placing two pages side by side on one landscape sheet halves the count immediately. Because most documents carry generous margins, the text usually remains comfortably readable at that size.

Four pages per sheet halves it again, and this is where judgement is needed. For a document set in a reasonable size with wide margins, four-up is legible. For dense text, small print or detailed tables, it is not, and printing something you cannot read saves no paper at all.

• Two per sheet: safe for almost any normal document
• Four per sheet: fine for drafts, reference copies and anything with large type
• Six or more: rarely readable outside very large print
• Combine with double-sided to divide the total by four

Three: print on both sides

If the printer supports duplex, switching it on halves the sheet count independently of anything else. Combined with two-up, a two hundred page document becomes fifty sheets.

If it does not support duplex, most dialogs let you print odd pages, turn the stack over and print even pages. Do a four-page test first to learn which way your particular printer wants the paper turned, because getting it wrong on two hundred pages is a memorable waste.

Four: check the scale

Print dialogs commonly default to shrinking pages slightly to fit a printable area. That is usually harmless, but combined with two-up or four-up it compounds, and text ends up smaller than it needed to be.

Where the option exists, print at actual size and let the layout do the reduction, rather than applying two reductions in sequence.

Before you commit to the whole thing

1. Decide the page range and prepare a smaller document if you will print it more than once.
2. Choose pages per sheet, erring towards two unless the type is large.
3. Enable double-sided printing if available.
4. Print the first four pages only, as a test.
5. Look at the test properly: is the smallest text readable, is anything cut off, is the binding margin adequate.

The test print is the whole discipline. It costs one sheet and it catches every one of the mistakes above before they are multiplied by two hundred.

A note on annotation

If the point of printing is to write on it, two-up leaves very little room in the margins. For a document you intend to mark up, print single pages and save paper on the range instead — print the twenty pages you will actually annotate rather than shrinking all two hundred.