How to Make a Two-Sided InDesign Document

Part of Adobe's Creative Cloud software suite, InDesign CC is a page-layout program for creating books, brochures, reports, magazines and more in both digital and physical formats. You don't often see single-sided pages in something like a magazine or brochure, which is why InDesign offers all kinds of ways to arrange, duplicate and lay out pages – just hop over to the Pages panel to get started.

When creating a booklet in InDesign, the Pages panel offers instant visual access to the layout of each page in your project, illustrating how the project is ordered and arranged for both digital and physical viewing. Here, you arrange pages in single or spread format, the latter of which joins pages in groups of two or more.

The double-sided part comes in during the printing process. Double-sided printing isn't a feature of InDesign itself, but rather a feature of the printer. If your printer supports duplex printing, you can print double-sided documents from InDesign.

Start by accessing the Pages menu by clicking "Layout" and then "Pages." To move a page's position, choose "Move Pages," then drag and drop it from the Page's thumbnail display in InDesign. You can also edit its position by selecting a page and clicking the "Destination" option.

As you drag pages, you'll see a vertical black bar. This indicates where the page will end up when you drop it. With this system, you can drag a page into another one to make a spread or separate it from others in a group to make individual pages.

Notice that no matter how your pages are arranged, each page still has a corresponding number. This comes into play when you want to print double-sided docs.

To start printing from InDesign, click the "Printer" button in the "Print" dialog box to open a window full of printing options, such as which specific pages to print and the size of the pages.

Look for an option that says something like "Print on both sides of paper" or "Double-sided printing" and make sure that the box next to it is checked. On older operating systems, you may have to click the "Properties" button first and then choose "2-Sided Print." You have to do a little mental math with your InDesign page numbers: Page one is side one, page two is the back of page one, page three is the front of the next page, page four is the back of page three, and so on. Use the "Pages to Print" section of the printer dialog box to select specific pages to print.

Depending on the make and model of your printer, the details may vary just a bit, but the basics of the process should remain fairly consistent.

If you don't see these options available on your Windows PC, enter the "Printers and Faxes" settings from the "Start" menu, and right-click your printer. Choose "Printing Preferences," "Advanced," "Document Options" and "Printer Features," and then make sure that duplex printing is set to "on."