My experience is different. Set up the document with page size and margins as intended for output. Use brochure print (A4 pages to A3 sheets, A5 pages to A4 sheets) and everything is output as expected. Writer brochure print only shrinks output when it is necessary in order to fit the laid out page onto the designated half of the paper sheet.
Admittedly, that experience is from a few years back, when I was still using the Apache OpenOffice primarily. @wiggers42 posts indicate a similar experience, and @mikekaganskiâs suggested workaround agrees with that mindset, so it seems that I am not alone, and that the same - in principle, and sometimes in practice - pertains also to LO Writer.
While I assume that your suggested workflow does the job (as indeed it also has done for me in a pinch), you could perhaps adjust your insistence that it be âthe only correct wayâ. It is not.
Preferably, use the suggested (slightly roundabout) solution already provided by @mikekaganski. It usually fixes the âhiccupâ.
If that doesnât help (not unthinkable, particularly if your work-in-progress has been saved as docx; visiting MS Word context can mess up things with document formatting in unpredictable ways; it works until it suddenly doesnât), my âgo-toâ emergency solution is print-to-pdf (plain print, no brochure settings applied), then open that pdf in a PDF viewer that supports brochure print, and make your proper (paper) printout from there.
Iâd suggest Adobe Reader, but just about any other PDF-enabled software should do, with the exception of Microsoft Edge. (Edge is fine as a web browser. Windows constantly tries to keep it as default PDF viewer. It is OK for PDF viewing, but terrible at printing.)
The suggested workaround would involve a huge amount of work. There are 16 pages with multiple fonts and images. Spending another week laying it out again in A4 in order to print it at A5 is unacceptable. How does this work with US paper sizes, which donât follow the â2 rule?
I have tried the PDF route and even that fails. Is LO embedding something? This used to work as well!
I have saved as ODT, no change.
âIt was partially broken already in 7.4.0.3 (summer 2022), the same way as in the current 24.8.4.1.â
That has nothing to do with paper size.
âNow click Cancel, and click Print button again. Magically, this is now correct.â
This does seem to work!
The other solution I found is to borrow a laptop with MS Word and print from that.
If youâre wondering why I havenât replied for a while, itâs because the system has made me wait 24hrs. Apparently Iâm new here even though Iâve posted many times in the past. For some reason the credentials I used before (saved in Bitwarden) no longer work and the password reset failed. So I had to create a new account but mysteriously my username was already in use.
What specifically âhas nothing to do with paper sizeâ? The said old version (mis)behaves exactly as current version (it places the A5 page wrong in Brochure mode on A4 paper initially). The same workaround with cancel-print-again works there. What specifically did you try to tell?
(And itâs all confusing, seeing the âsuggested workaround would involve a huge amount of work ⌠Spending another week laying it out again in A4 in order to print it at A5 is unacceptableâ in reply to @keme1 who didnât suggest re-layouting a single bit ⌠neither did I, to whom you obviously address at least part of your reply.)
This is where I was told to reformat it as A4.
Please answer specific posts. Your text posted as a reply to a specific answer by @keme1, but addressing text from a different reply and of different author, only confuses and looks like putting words into other peopleâs mouths.