Combine A5 into A4 pdf without scaling

For our ceilidh band we keep the sheet music for our tunes as a folder of landscape A5 pdf documents. I combine these into a portrait A4 tunebook with 2 tunes on each page. To do that I use Preview and the print option Layout > Pages per Sheet set to 2. So far so good.

But the music always ends up a little scaled down. Smaller than it would be if you just put two of the original A5 pages one about the other.

Is there a simple way to avoid that scaling? I've tried adjusting the percentage in the Scale setting (153% seems to produce a reasonable result). But it feels like I'm missing the 'just print the pages at their original size' setting.

Mac mini, macOS 15.6

Posted on Oct 4, 2025 3:28 AM

Reply
2 replies

Oct 6, 2025 9:37 PM in response to JWaterworth

Preview probably has its limitations. There is a free, third-party PDF tool (Coherent PDF or cpdf) that can impose two A5 landscape PDFs onto a portrait A4 PDF from the Terminal command line:

cpdf -merge a5_1.pdf a5_2.pdf AND -impose-xy "1 2" a4.pdf -o done.pdf


I recommend downloading the PDF manual as well. I put the cpdf executable in my /usr/local/bin directory.


The follwing (unscaled) A5 and A4 documents have 1-inch margins and without header/footer enabled. The black rectangles are the document body boundaries of the A5 documents.




[Edited by Moderator]

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Combine A5 into A4 pdf without scaling

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.