Booklet printing is not working correctly with Word 2003 and with Word 2002

Booklet printing from Microsoft Office Word 2003 and from Microsoft Word 2002 to a PostScript printer generates pages that are overwritten. Output appears in ordinary letter page size instead of being reduced to half-page size.

In most cases, when printing PostScript, the driver does n-up printing (n pages per sheet). However, with booklet printing (2 pages per sheet), you also have to order the pages. Because the driver cannot do page ordering, the print processor must handle both tasks of n-up printing and page ordering.

To do n-up printing, the print processor uses the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) transformation matrix to scale and rotate each page. Additionally, the print processor must control the order in which pages are played back. GDI then replays the spool job (the enhanced metafile [EMF]), and the driver converts it to PostScript code. The driver does not do any rotating or scaling.

The spool file may contain PostScript code, which GDI can neither rotate nor scale and must send directly to the driver. The driver sends this PostScript code directly to the printer without applying any transformation. Therefore, the PostScript part of the EMF is printed without scaling or rotating, while the non-PostScript part of the EMF prints as expected.

This behavior is by design.