Saturday 31 March 2012

How to print Filofax Personal pages on A4 paper

I've made a number of Personal page templates for the Filofax on A4 paper. The idea is that these should be printed and then the Personal pages cut out. But I've never given detailed instructions for how to do this, so if you were wondering, you need wonder no more.

You need to start with one of my templates. I'll be using the Sudoku page as an example.

The template is double-sided and you need to print on both sides of the paper. With a duplex printer, set it to flip on the short edge. Here's how this looks in my printer's dialog; yours may vary somewhat:


Once your page has printed, place it on a cutting mat to protect your desk. Turn it the right way up so you can see the crop marks, indicated in this picture:


Those crop marks indicate where you need to cut. You need to cut with a sharp craft knife and you need to use a steel ruler to guide your cuts.

I normally start with the rightmost cut. Here's the ruler in position:


Zooming in, you can see how the ruler in placed right at the crop line:


You need to use the knife now and cut from one crop mark to the next. Don't cut right to the edges of the paper, though, just to the crop mark, or a little beyond it:



If you cut right to the edge you will lose the remaining marks that you need to position the ruler for other cuts.

When you've made all three vertical cuts, the sheet will look like this:


You now need to turn the piece around and position the ruler for the horizontal cuts:


When you're all done, you'll have liberated two pages and have the A4 frame left, all in one piece:


You can now punch and file these pages.

11 comments:

Nicole said...

Any tips for using a craft knife? Or am I using it wrongly? For some reason all the blades seem to be for left-handers. I hold the ruler down with my left hand, and with my right, I cut along the right edge of the ruler. I've to cut away from me (otherwise the blade faces the wrong way and I end up shaving little slivers off the ruler).

Ray Blake said...

It's hard to describe, but I angle the blade slightly to the flat side lies against the ruler rather than the cutting edge.

Anita said...

Thanks, Ray :)
I never did get my head round printing for the personal size, so that's great.

Unknown said...

Can i recommend using not a craft knife which can be difficult but a rotary cutter which is sold for quilters and a quilting ruler. The rotary cutter is a sort of cross between a pizza wheel and a craft knife. Cutting multiple sheets of paper with one is easy.

Ray Blake said...

I'll give that a try. Thanks, Helen.

... said...

Hi, I would like to print the inserts you created for the personal size.

Do I need to follow these directions or can I just press print on regular paper in MS Word?

Ray Blake said...

What do you mean by 'regular paper'?

... said...

8.5x11 sized white printer paper

Ray Blake said...

I see. I wondered if you meant personal sized Filofax paper. The paper you're talking about is US Letter size. It is regular in North America, whereas in Europe we view A4 as regular. The sizes are close, but different enough to cause difficulties.

Here's what I'd suggest you do if you can't use A4:

1. Print one page onto Letter paper, making sure that the settings are not set to scale to paper size. This should print the pages at the right size.

2. Now try a double-sided print, setting it to flip on the short edge. My guess is that the two sides will not properly align.

3. If I guessed right, what you now need to do is change the page layout in Word to Letter paper and try again.

4. If the front and back are still misaligned, then group all the objects on each page and relative to the page, centre them both vertically and horizontally, then try again.

5. If you still have no luck, then try to find an online source for A4 paper.

... said...

Thanks for the suggestion. I found reasonably priced A4 paper on Amazon. I'll buy some to print my Filofax pages. Thanks for all you do!

Ray Blake said...

You're welcome. Let me know how you get on.

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