Getting a Xerox 7835 to Make 5.5 X 8.5 Booklets

We had a client with a Xerox 7830 who needed to print booklets in 5.5 X 8.5.  It created a huge learning curve for us, but here is what we learned.  We have tried printing from Adobe and Word and keep getting errors that paper is not reading (please load drawer 3 or 4) but that doesn’t work because the orientation of those pages are 90 degrees wrong in the paper tray.  So we went back and forth, the client even figuring out how to do it via Centreware (put the IP address of the copier in a browser) and submit the job through there.

I am not a huge fan of that answer, so I reached out to Xerox, asking how to make a saddle stitched 5.5 X 8.5 booklet via the driver, and not through some crazy special protocol.  I sent the file to Xerox and this was the reply I got.

“My guess is going to be that they are trying to make Word or Acrobat/Reader do the booklet, and they should not.”

So lets break it down to jobs types. So the Seriously .pdf job, it is already a book, and they only need it to be folded and stapled, not made into a booklet at all, and due to a bad UI choice in Xerox drivers, it causes a lot of issues unless you know where to look.  This is where I am here to help you!

File > Print > Properties (also make sure the highlights match on theirs to mine)

Match this for your book.

And here is where it gets weird, you obviously select Fold and staple (1), but because you need to tell the driver to not Impose the print (it is already in booklet format, you need to select the icon(2)

Now, Imposition Source is key, Imposed by driver means the printer will put pages side by side in the right order to make a booklet when folded and stapled, but in this file, you don’t want that, because they already did it. So you need to select Preimposed by App (1) And I highly suggest setting the size manually, because Auto may do this in a weird way.

The application you use really doesn’t matter as long as the application isn’t making the booklet, if it is, you need to do as above, if it isn’t, just do everything in the driver

So in Word, Don’t touch anything in X and go straight to Printer Properties (1) > Finishing (2) > Booklet Creation and juts use the following exactly and it should print perfectly

Those methods will cover all jobs from all applications, you just have to figure out from the beginning whether or not you are folding and stapling (Preimposed by app) or creating a booklet that happens to be folded and stapled (Imposed by driver)