I often wander around without a computer, so I needed a nice easy way to print important bits into little books of information that I could carry around in my pocket. Chad Adams figured out a brilliant technique of cutting and folding pieces of paper into little books and called it PocketMod. The technique was brilliant, but the software was a little awkward. So I, knowing a little about Cocoa, hacked together PagePacker.

Click here to download PagePacker. It is a universal binary that runs on MacOS X 10.4. It has some informative help, too. (This version will expire in June. In June, it will be time to upgrade to a new version for Leopard.)

1. Overall, you put together eight pages by dragging out standard DIY Planner pages from the catalog.

1. Or by dragging out any image file or PDF onto the document. The files are scaled and rotated as necessary to make them fit:

1. After printing onto 8.5” x 11” paper, you fold the paper lengthwise. The inky parts should be on the outside:

1. Then, unfold it. In the other direction, fold it on the three lines like a fan. The inky parts end up inside the fan:

1. Open the outer two flaps of the fan, and cut along the dotted line:

1. Fold the first fold again (With the outer flaps open and the inner flap cut, you can now refold the paper lengthwise)

1. Finally, put the front cover in front and the back in back. Voila! A little book!

Special thanks to Douglas Johnston. The DIY
Planner forms are released by Douglas Johnston under a Creative
Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license, which
means that they are free for personal and non-commercial use. Use
within a business setting is fine as long as they are not
mass-produced (i.e., in numbers greater than 50). “Getting Things
Done” and its related concepts are copyright David Allen, All Rights Reserved.

And, yes, I promise to do an A4 version in a week or so.