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

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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]

Combine A5 into A4 pdf without scaling

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