BookLightning for Mac

User Reviews

• Simple & very good for booklets but needs...

  Steve9988January 28, 2004

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  ...instructions<br />This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />One of the previous posters encouraged me to try this seriously and I'm glad I did. The lack of good instructions had discouraged me when it first came out, and that's still a problem. The developer thinks I know more than I do. I encourage others to try. Maybe this will help: For a test, I used a 17-page Word document with 40 footnotes and a picture but without other sophisticated formatting. I opened it, and in Page Setup I selected "Half Letter" as a paper size, which my printer blessedly allowed. (I suppose I could have created a custom paper size.) I doubled-checked the reformatted doc for glitches, which were easily corrected. I found the standard margins didn't look well, so in Format under Document I changed them to T/B=1"; L/R=0.6; gutter=0.7; no mirror. Your mileage may differ. Under Print, I selected Make PDF. After making sure that BookLightning's preferences called for "Letter," I dropped that PDF file on BookLightning's icon. Presto...a correctly-paged, conveniently-sized booklet. I even think that by going to the obscure "Paper Handling" command in the final Print dialogue, one could select "Print Odd," flip the stack, then "Print Even," and get double-sided, even without an automatic double-sided printer. Very interesting. Photo came out only OK but it may have been the poor paper I used. I've been looking for an OS X ClickBook (which is still OS 9 and is the same $49 price as BookLighning), and this may well be IT. It's a one-trick pony (makes one-fold booklets) but seems to do it well. I'm going to give it a try. Thanks to previous posters.

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