Printing and Binding Pinyin Materials

Begin with the PDF, not the browser

Printing an annotated page is where a lot of otherwise good material quietly degrades. The pinyin is the smallest element on the page, so it is the first thing that scaling, margins or ink coverage destroys, and by the time the sheet is in your hand the damage is already done. The way to avoid all of it is to treat the PDF as the master document. Export once from the online annotation tool — the Export PDF button produces a file laid out from the annotated result, and Export Word is for cases where you still need to add images or rearrange items — then print from that file rather than from the browser window.

Printing from the browser works, but it re-flows the page at the moment of printing, which is why headers, footers and slightly different margins appear. A PDF is fixed: what you checked on screen at 100 per cent is what comes out of the printer, and the same file can be sent to a print shop unchanged.

A4 page setup: margins, scaling, headers and footers

Start with the paper size. A4 is 210 × 297 mm and is what most of the world uses; in North America choose US Letter, which is 216 × 279 mm. Setting the wrong size is the classic cause of a page that looks fine in the preview and is cut off at the bottom in reality, because the printer scales the content to the wrong sheet.

Leave margins of at least 15 mm all round. If the sheet will be stapled, punched or bound on one edge, add 5 mm for a stapled edge and 10 to 15 mm for a glued spine, so the text block is not buried in the fold. Set the print scale to 100 per cent, or to "actual size" if that is what the dialog calls it. Avoid "fit to printable area" and "shrink oversized pages" unless you have a specific reason: both resize the page by a few per cent, and a five per cent reduction on 15 px pinyin turns it into 14 px, which is enough to make it uncomfortable at reading distance.

Then suppress what the browser adds. In Chrome's print dialog, uncheck Headers and footers; that single option is responsible for the URL, date and page number that otherwise appear over your text. If your layout uses coloured blocks or shaded backgrounds, tick Background graphics instead — coloured pinyin text prints regardless, but background fills are omitted by default and the page will look unfinished without them. Finally, if you are printing in colour, check that the pinyin colour still reads as distinct from the character colour; if the printer is monochrome, a pale pinyin colour will fade into the paper, so use a darker one.

Single-sided or double-sided

Single-sided printing is the right default for anything the reader will write on. Handwriting needs a surface, ink from the reverse side shows through and competes with the text, and worksheets are often cut up or reordered. It also costs nothing to get right at home, where duplex alignment is frequently a millimetre or two out.

Double-sided printing is for reading material: books, booklets, and long passages that will be kept. It halves the paper and, more importantly, it is what makes a two-page spread possible — the layout where the text sits on one page and the illustration faces it on the other. Two settings matter. For ordinary portrait documents, choose flip on long edge, which produces book-style facing pages. For a folded booklet, where two portrait pages are imposed side by side on a landscape sheet, choose flip on short edge, because the content on each side is rotated and a long-edge flip would put the second side upside down. If your first double-sided sheet comes out with one side inverted, the flip setting is the only thing to change.

Avoiding clipped text

Text is clipped for three reasons, and all three are checkable in advance. The first is a page box narrower than the content, which happens when the document was designed on one paper size and printed on another; fix it by matching the paper size and scaling at 100 per cent. The second is a printer's non-printable border: most desktop printers cannot place ink within about 5 mm of the sheet edge, so anything inside that band disappears silently. Keep a safety margin of at least 5 mm beyond your layout margins so the printable area never bites into the text.

The third reason is specific to annotated text and easy to miss: pinyin tone marks sit above the pinyin line, and if the line spacing is tight the mark on one line collides with the character below or above it. Long pinyin strings — a syllable like zhuāng under a single character — also extend wider than the character and can overrun a narrow column. When you proof the PDF, look for a page where two lines of pinyin are close together and check that every diacritic is fully visible. If not, increase the line spacing in the word processor, or reduce the character size slightly and let the lines breathe.

Paper weight: 80 gsm versus 120 gsm

Eighty gsm is standard copier paper, and it is the correct choice for interior pages of anything under about thirty pages. It feeds reliably through desktop printers, folds without cracking and keeps the finished item thin enough to staple. If you print double-sided, 80 gsm shows a little of the reverse side through the sheet, which matters more than usual for annotated pages because the coloured pinyin reads as faint background noise. Moving the interior to 100 gsm removes most of that at a modest cost.

One hundred and twenty gsm and above belongs on covers and single-sheet handouts. A 120 gsm cover gives a book a solid feel and resists crumpling; 200 to 250 gsm card makes a genuinely stiff cover but cannot be folded cleanly for a saddle-stitched spine without first scoring the fold line with a bone folder or the back of a spoon, or the coating will crack along the fold. The practical rule: interiors at 80 to 100 gsm, covers at 120 to 200 gsm with scoring, and never mix a heavy interior with a stapled spine, because a thick block simply will not fold flat. For a saddle-stitched booklet, aim for no more than about twenty-four pages at 80 gsm or twelve to sixteen at 120 gsm.

Two binding methods you can do at home

Saddle stitch is the cheapest book binding and the one that most resembles a real booklet. Fold the whole block in half, then drive two or three staples through the fold from the outside, on the spine line. The folding must be done as a block, not page by page, or the inner pages will stick out beyond the outer ones. A long-arm stapler or a dedicated booklet stapler reaches the fold; an ordinary stapler cannot, and forcing one usually produces a creased page. The limitation is thickness: the more sheets you add, the further the inner pages push out at the fore edge, and beyond about six sheets the effect becomes obvious.

Glued binding — the flat-spined style used by most paperbacks — is achievable at home for a thicker block. Clamp the pages together squarely, roughen the spine edge very lightly with sandpaper so the glue has something to grip, apply a flexible PVA adhesive along the spine, press a strip of cloth or mull into the wet glue, and leave it clamped to dry. The cover then goes on as a separate piece with a spine panel as wide as the block is thick. It is slower than stapling and unforgiving of a badly squared clamp, but it handles page counts that saddle stitching cannot. If neither appeals, the pragmatic middle ground is to punch two holes and hold the block with treasury tags or a slide-on clip, or to take the PDF to a copy shop for comb or coil binding, which is cheap and handles any thickness.

Page order when you make a folded booklet

A folded booklet is printed two pages per sheet side, and the pages are not in reading order on the sheet. The page count must be a multiple of four; if it is not, add blank pages at the end (a good place for a vocabulary list or notes) rather than leaving the imposition to guess. Number of sheets equals total pages divided by four. On the outermost sheet, the front carries the last page and the first page, and the back carries the second and the second-to-last.

• Four pages, one sheet: front is page 4 and page 1; back is page 2 and page 3.
• Eight pages, two sheets. Outer sheet: front is page 8 and page 1; back is page 2 and page 7.
• Eight pages, inner sheet: front is page 6 and page 3; back is page 4 and page 5.
• Twelve pages, outermost sheet: front is page 12 and page 1; back is page 2 and page 11. The next sheet in: front is page 10 and page 3; back is page 4 and page 9.

The pattern to remember is that the first and last pages share a sheet, the second and second-to-last share the facing side, and each sheet further in moves one page closer to the middle from both ends. Most print drivers and PDF readers have a Booklet option that performs this imposition for you — set it, choose the flip setting, print one sheet and fold it before committing to the run. If you would rather not trust the driver, impose the pages yourself and print single-sided, then fold and assemble in the order above.

Home printer or print shop?

Print at home when the job is small, personal, and likely to change. Under a dozen pages, a home laser or inkjet wins on convenience: no minimum order, revisions cost nothing, and you can reprint a single corrected page. The trade-offs are duplex registration that is rarely exact, ink costs on colour-heavy pages, no trimming, and paper that is limited to what the feed mechanism accepts.

Go to a print shop when the job is bigger, when it needs a proper cover, or when several identical copies are needed. Shops impose booklets correctly, print on heavier stock, trim to a clean edge, and staple or glue the result — none of which is easy to reproduce at home. The cost is a lead time and a minimum quantity, so it makes sense above roughly two dozen pages, or whenever the item is a gift, a class set, or something that should survive being handled repeatedly.

Briefing a print shop with a PDF

Hand over the PDF, never a Word file, and give the instructions in writing beside it. A brief that avoids almost every misunderstanding reads like this: A4 portrait, print at 100 per cent with no scaling, double-sided, flip on short edge, colour for the pages that carry annotated text, interiors on 80 gsm, cover on 120 gsm, saddle stitch along the short edge, trim to A4, and how many copies you need. If your illustrations run to the edge of the page, say so and supply the file with 3 mm of bleed and crop marks rather than asking the shop to improvise; if nothing bleeds, ask them not to add crop marks, since they will otherwise print inside the trim area.

Two checks prevent the most common disappointment. Confirm that the fonts are embedded in the PDF — if they are not, the shop's machine may substitute a font that has no traditional Chinese coverage and your text will come back as empty boxes, so mention which CJK font family the document expects. Then ask for a single proof sheet before the full run, and fold it. Folding is the test that reveals a wrong flip setting, a page count that is not a multiple of four, and margins that collide with the spine, all of which are cheap to fix on one sheet and expensive to fix on fifty.

Where to go next

The production chain that leads to this page is covered in making a pinyin picture book, while adding pinyin to worksheets covers sheets that are printed and written on rather than bound. If your text is in traditional characters, check the traditional text guide for font coverage before you print. Everything is collected in the Tutorials, readings can be checked in the polyphonic characters reference, and the annotation itself is done with the free online annotation tool.