How to print Half Letter on Letter paper

Half Letter is the one planner size that halves its parent sheet perfectly, and once you know that, printing it at home stops being fiddly.

The arithmetic that makes this easy

A US Letter sheet turned on its side is 792 points wide. A Half Letter page is 396 points wide. Two of them is 792 points.

The fit is exact. Not close, not within a millimetre: exact, to the point. There is one cut line down the centre of the sheet and both halves are precisely 5.5 x 8.5 inches.

For comparison, A5 on A4 leaves exactly 1.00 mm of slack, because ISO rounds A5 down to 148 mm rather than the 148.5 mm that halving A4 would give. That millimetre is not a problem, and centring each page turns it into half a millimetre per side, but it is there. Half Letter on Letter leaves nothing at all.

If you print planner inserts at home regularly and you are choosing between the two sizes on that basis alone, this is the one that will annoy you less.

What to do

1. Download the 2 per sheet version of whichever layout you want.
2. Print at Actual size or 100%. Never Fit to page.
3. If printing both sides, flip on the short edge.
4. Cut down the centre line.

Two usable planner pages per sheet, both exactly the right size.

Why Actual size matters

Every scaling option in a print dialog resizes the artwork to fit what the driver believes the printable area to be, which is always smaller than the paper. A file designed with 12.7 mm margins comes out with roughly 11 mm, the artwork shrinks by a few percent, and if you are punching the pages the holes land at the wrong depth.

Our files set PrintScaling to None inside the PDF, so most dialogs preselect Actual size. If yours does not, the setting is called Actual size in Acrobat, Scale: 100% in macOS Preview with Scale to fit unchecked, and Scale: Default or Custom: 100 in Chrome and Edge.

Never use the printer’s Pages per sheet option

This is the single most common way people end up with pages the wrong shape.

Pages per sheet, sometimes called Multiple or N-up, takes a full-size page and scales it to fit a slot. Putting a Letter page into a half-Letter slot means scaling by the smaller of the two ratios, which works out at 64.71%, and because the aspect ratios do not match you get a white band roughly 35 mm wide down the sheet. The result is two undersized pages with unequal margins.

An imposed 2-up file does something different: it draws two genuine Half Letter pages, at full size, onto a landscape Letter sheet. There is no scaling step anywhere in the process.

Flip on the short edge

The 2-up sheet is landscape. Landscape sheets flip on the short edge; portrait sheets flip on the long edge. Get it wrong and every second side is upside down.

Our 2-up files request short-edge duplex in the PDF, so in most cases it is already set. If your printer has no automatic duplex, print the odd sheets, return the stack, and print the even sheets. Test with two before committing to a term’s worth.

Cutting

A guillotine gives the cleanest edge and is worth borrowing if you are doing more than a few. A craft knife against a steel ruler is close behind. Cut a few sheets at a time rather than the whole stack: paper shifts under a blade and by the twentieth sheet the edge will have drifted.

Because the fit is exact, the centre line is the page edge on both halves. There is no waste to trim and no margin to lose.

If you would rather have trim marks on all four sides, use the centred variant: one Half Letter page positioned in the middle of a Letter sheet with 38.10 mm at the sides and 31.75 mm top and bottom, with corner marks. One page per sheet instead of two, more precise, more paper.

Punching for a disc-bound planner

Half Letter is the dominant insert size in the North American disc-bound world, and disc-bound is unusually well standardised: the mushroom-hole pitch is 25.40 mm, exactly one inch, across Levenger Circa, Staples ARC, TUL, Atoma and the Happy Planner. A page punched for one fits all of them.

On a Half Letter page that gives eight holes with a hole span of 177.80 mm and a 19.05 mm gap at each end. Those end gaps landing on exact fractions of an inch is a good sign the pattern is genuinely regular rather than approximated.

Use the disc-bound binding option so the file adds a 12.7 mm allowance on the punched edge. Disc punches remove a mushroom shape rather than a round hole, so they eat slightly more of the margin than a ring punch does, and a page laid out without the allowance loses the first character of every line.

Half Letter or A5

They look interchangeable and they are not. Half Letter is 139.7 x 215.9 mm; A5 is 148 x 210 mm. Half Letter is 8.3 mm narrower and 5.9 mm taller, and the hole patterns are entirely different, so inserts do not swap between binders.

If you already own a binder, the binder decides. If you are starting from nothing and printing at home on Letter paper, Half Letter is the easier life.