How to print an A5 planner at home

Most people who try this end up with a planner that is slightly too small, with margins that do not match the ones in the file. The cause is almost always the same setting, and it takes about ten seconds to fix.

The short version

1. Use a file that is genuinely A5, not a Letter file you are scaling down.
2. In the print dialog, set scaling to Actual size or 100%. Never Fit to page.
3. Either print on real A5 paper, or print the 2-up sheet on A4 and cut down the middle.

That is the whole method. The rest of this explains why each step matters, because the failure modes are not obvious until you have a stack of slightly wrong paper.

Step one: start with a real A5 file

This is where most attempts fail before the printer is involved.

A great many files given away as A5 planners are US Letter files. We downloaded and inspected sixteen free weekly planner PDFs from the sites that rank for these searches, and every single one had a page box of 612 x 792 points, which is 8.5 x 11 inches. Several of the pages serving them mention A5 in the print instructions. The file underneath is Letter.

You can check this in about five seconds. Open the PDF and look at its document properties: most readers show the page size. If it says 8.5 x 11 in, or 216 x 279 mm, or 612 x 792 pt, it is Letter. A real A5 file reads 148 x 210 mm, 5.83 x 8.27 in, or 419.53 x 595.28 pt.

Every planner page on this site prints its own page box in small type at the bottom of the sheet, so you can check what you have without opening a dialog at all.

Step two: the print dialog

There is one setting that matters and it goes by different names.

• Adobe Acrobat and Reader: Page Sizing and Handling, choose Actual size
• macOS Preview: uncheck Scale to fit, or set Scale: 100%
• Chrome and Edge: open More settings, set Scale to Default or Custom: 100
• Firefox: Scale, set to 100%

What you are avoiding is anything called Fit to page, Shrink oversized pages, Fit to printable area or Scale to fit. All of them resize the artwork to fit whatever the driver believes the printable area to be, which is smaller than the paper. The result is a page reduced by a few percent with margins that no longer match the design.

Our files help here: they carry a PrintScaling setting of None in the PDF catalogue, which makes most print dialogs preselect Actual size for you. It is one line inside the file and almost nobody in this category sets it.

Step three: paper

If you have A5 paper or an A5 tray, print the native A5 file at 100% and you are done.

If you are printing on A4, use the 2-up file. It places two A5 pages side by side on a landscape A4 sheet with a cut line down the centre. Print at 100%, then cut.

Two A5 pages side by side measure 839.06 points against A4’s 841.89, so the total slack is 2.83 points, which is exactly 1.00 mm. That gap exists because ISO rounds A5 to 148 mm rather than the 148.5 mm that halving A4 would give. Each page is centred in its own half, so the error is half a millimetre per side and both pages are still exactly A5.

Do not use the printer’s own two-per-sheet option

This is the trap that produces what people describe as elongated halves.

The Pages per sheet, Multiple or N-up option in your print dialog does not do what a 2-up file does. It takes a full-size page and scales it down to fit the slot. For a Letter page in a half-Letter slot the scale works out at 64.71%, and because the aspect ratios do not match you also get a white band down the sheet roughly 35 mm wide. The pages are the wrong size and they are not centred either.

An imposed 2-up file is different in kind: the child page genuinely is A5 at 100%, positioned on the sheet by the file itself. Nothing is scaled at any point.

Cutting

A guillotine is fastest and gives the squarest edge. A craft knife against a steel ruler is nearly as good and costs almost nothing. Scissors will work and will show.

Cut on the printed centre line. If you are cutting a stack, cut a few sheets at a time rather than the whole pile: paper shifts under a blade, and by sheet twenty the edge will have wandered.

If you want trim marks on all four sides rather than a single centre line, use the centred variant instead. It places one A5 page in the middle of an A4 sheet with 31.00 mm at the sides and 43.50 mm top and bottom, with marks at every corner. You get one page per sheet instead of two, which is wasteful, but the trimming is more precise.

An exact-fit 2-up cannot carry outer trim marks, and it is worth understanding why: the child page edges are the sheet edges. There is nowhere outside them to print a mark.

Double-sided

Print double-sided and flip on the short edge. The 2-up sheet is landscape, and flipping on the long edge puts every second side upside down. Our files request the correct flip edge, so in most cases it will already be set.

If your printer does not do automatic duplex, print the odd pages, put the stack back in, and print the even pages. Test with two sheets before committing to fifty.

Paper weight

80 gsm copier paper works fine and is what most people have. If you are punching pages for a binder and expect them to survive being turned every day for a year, 100 gsm is noticeably more durable and takes fountain pen ink without showing through. 120 gsm feels excellent and is unnecessary for anything except a cover.

One warning: branded organiser paper from the big planner names is often only 60 to 80 gsm and can curl in a laser printer. Plain copier paper is frequently the better choice.

Punching

If the pages are going into a six-ring A5 organiser, use the binding option that adds a punch allowance. Ours adds 15 mm on the punched edge and mirrors it across a spread, so the left page is punched on its left and the right page on its right. Getting that backwards is invisible until the sheets are in the binder and half your writing is under the rings.

The A5 six-ring pattern is six holes in two groups of three: 19.05 mm within each group, 69.85 mm between the groups, for a total hole span of 146.05 mm on a 210 mm edge.

If it still comes out wrong

Measure the printed page. If it is 148 x 210 mm, it worked. If it is a few millimetres small in both directions, scaling is still on somewhere: check both the print dialog and any printer-specific settings behind an Advanced or Properties button, since some drivers keep their own scale setting the dialog does not show.

If the page is the right width but the wrong height, or the reverse, the file was not A5 to begin with.