Can someone recommend an easy way to convert a PDF file into a quarter page booklet?
I'd like to have each page a 1/4 the size of a regular piece of paper, in a booklet style, printing on the front and back, and have 4 pages per page one side of piece of paper.
That way I can cut the page in half and minimize the amount of paper I use while making a quarter page size booklet I can keep in my pocket.
I don't know about other browsers, but Firefox's print dialog offers the option to fit multiple pages onto a single sheet natively. You can just print to PDF (or paper directly) in that manner.
Do you plan on cutting up all your quarter sheets and rebinding them? Because if you are expecting to fold the printouts as-is and have the pages in the correct order, you'll need a slightly more clever solution.
Apropos of nothing, Inkscape (free, open source) does a very competent job these days of importing .pdf's, at which point you can scale, rearrange, or otherwise edit them however you see fit. This will be tedious, but will allow you to do basically anything you want with the content.
LibreOffice Writer (and Draw, which can load .pdfs) have the option to change the page order when you are printing multiple pages scaled onto one sheet. They also have a "brochure" print setting which automatically half sizes a document to fit four pages on one sheet, two on each side, correctly reordered for you to fold it in the middle. Would that work?
When you said "regular" piece of paper, are you talking about A4 or letter size ?
If you are using A4 the answer is quite easy, get a pack of A5 paper and print on it using the book mode of it printer. It will automatically organize the sheets in the right order. Then with a stapler you can attach them all together.
If you are using the American standard ... Good luck.
Depends on your PDF viewer, but there is a print option to print 4 pages on one page. You will have to consider the print order to have front and back.
Lay the page order out in Excel (might be a nice puzzle in itself), concatenate into a single comma separated string, and feed that into the "what pages to print" print dialog field?
Also you can (usually) request a certain paper thickness that can make turning the tiny pages a little easier. I once got a quote for a textbook pdf and they accidentally told me the price for B&W but they honored it in color.