N-up (pages per sheet)

N-up (pages per sheet) offers four fixed layouts: 2-up, 4-up, 6-up and 9-up. 2-up places two pages on a 2 × 1 grid, 4-up uses a 2 × 2 grid, 6-up a 3 × 2 grid and 9-up a 3 × 3 grid, and the Layout chips are the only place that grid is set — there is no free-form rows-and-columns entry. The status line does the arithmetic for you: it reads back the page count and how many sheets the current layout will produce, so a 37-page report at 4-up shows as 37 pages → 10 sheets before you commit. Sheet size is a separate choice of A4, Letter or A3, with orientation left on Auto unless you override it. Auto turns the sheet landscape whenever the grid is wider than it is tall, or whenever your source pages are landscape.

The gutter is the white band the tool leaves around every cell, measured in millimetres and applied at the sheet edge as well as between cells. A 4 mm gutter on a 2 × 2 layout therefore reserves three bands across the sheet width and three down its height, not two. That is deliberate: it gives an inkjet or laser printer the unprintable margin it needs and leaves room for a hole punch or a staple. The field accepts 0 to 50 mm and starts at 4. Raising it shrinks every cell, so your pages are scaled down further; setting it to 0 pushes tiles right to the paper edge, where most desktop printers will clip them. The imposition preview redraws the cells as you change the number, so the trade-off is visible before you build the file.

Tile order decides which cell each successive page lands in. Across-then-down fills the top row from left to right and then moves to the next row — the way you read a page, and the right choice for handouts that someone will read as a grid. Down-then-across fills the first column top to bottom before moving right, which is what you want when the printed sheets will be guillotined into strips and stacked, because each finished stack then holds a run of consecutive pages. The numbered cells in the imposition preview are drawn in the order the tool will actually use, so slot 1 through slot 9 show exactly where page 1 through page 9 will go. Switching the chip re-numbers the preview immediately, with no need to rebuild.

Neither — each source page is scaled proportionally until it fits inside its cell, then centred there. The tool measures the page the way a reader displays it: the visible box, meaning the CropBox intersected with the MediaBox, plus any rotation flag. A scanned page that appears rotated 90 degrees in your viewer is therefore imposed the way you see it rather than the way its raw geometry happens to be stored. A landscape page dropped into a portrait cell simply leaves space above and below instead of being squashed. Mixed-size documents work too: every page is fitted by its own dimensions, so an A4 page and an A3 page in the same file each keep their proportions, just at different scales inside identical cells.

The final sheet is left part-empty, and that is all. Nine pages at 4-up produce three sheets: two full ones, then a last sheet holding page 9 in slot 1 with three empty cells after it. The tool does not pad your document with blank pages to round the count up, and it does not redistribute pages to balance the sheets. Pages that are structurally valid but carry no content stream — scanner separator sheets, blanks inserted by an editor — keep their slot rather than being silently dropped, so every later page stays in the position the numbered preview promised. If you want a particular page to start a fresh sheet, insert blank pages into the source with the organize tools first, then come back and impose.

N-up (pages per sheet) is free to use, with no account, no email step, no daily quota, and no watermark or branding of any kind added to the sheets you download. The imposition runs in your browser with pdf-lib, so PDFChamp never receives the file and has no per-conversion cost to recover from you. The saved PDF contains your pages, the layout you chose and nothing else — open it in a PDF inspector and there is no added text object to find. Practically, that also means the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page has loaded, and that confidential drafts, unpublished manuscripts and client decks can be imposed without ever leaving your machine.