Unofficial Tex Murphy

I've downloaded a manual for a Nikon D80 camera which has 161 pages and I'd like to make it into a book, with a cover, spine etc. so I can pack it away rather than have an A4 sized chunk of paper, and I've made a couple of blank books before now but never a printed book.

If I use Adobe Acrobat I can print books in a Booklet format, but it will only do a 'start to finish' thing, which will make for one very thick booklet (page 1 and 162, page 2 and 161 etc).

What will work though is if I can do it in chunks - Ie print off pages 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 61-80 and so on. I can then fold them 20 pages at a time and sew them together as a thick book that will stay together (if you look at any thick book you'll see they're done in that way - chunks put together).

The problem I have is that I can't separate the PDF into sections with Acrobat. I suspect if I can split the PDF pages up (into sections of 1-20 etc) I probably could then save as 5 or 6 files and print them that way.

Is there anything I can use to do that? I *think* on a Mac I can do this with built in software, but I'm not sure (I have Tiger). As for anything that will work on either Windows or Mac, I'm all ears for suggestions.

I take it you don't have the full version of Adobe Acrobat. The full version will let you extract out pages from your pdf into other pdf files. I've used this to separate out 1 pdf file into multiple smaller pdf files at work.

Does anybody at your office have the full version of Acrobat? If not, I suggest doing a search online for applications that will extract pages from pdf. Maybe you can get shareware app or a free trial of something.

Or if the file is not too big like less than 5MB, send it to me and I can chop it up into separate pdf files for you.

if it was me I would scan them & then email them to myself as a pdf file, that way you could make smaller pdf files. of course this way you do have to print the pages first.

The only problem with that is that you'd have to work out the layout of the pages to make sure that the left and right pages matched up - for example you'd need page 1 on the left and (say) page 40 on the right, followed by page 2 on the left and page 39 on the right. Working that out manually is giving me a headache already.

Sometimes you can find old Manuals for all sorts of things on ebay... Have you tried looking for a physical copy as apposed to a digital one???

Nah I reckon it will be fun making it, and the next step is to bind a book my Dad wrote before he died, so it will be a dummy run for that if I can get it working. I'll let you know how it goes!

I don't have any expertise, but I'll ask my wife if she has any tips. She's a graphic designer and has made several books (and, in fact, I think she took a book-making class in college).