4-up printing: make back side of sheet right?

Question

i would like to print 4-up and have the right page in the right place on the reverse side of sheet.
That is: i want to print (say) acrobat documents 1,3,5 &7 on the front side, and have doc 2 on reverse of doc 1 (ie directly behind doc 1 on the reverse side of the resulting printed sheet of paper), with (obviously) doc 4 on back of doc 3, et cetera.
The reason - i want to cut the printed sheets into quarters and use these quarters for a new book, with page numbers in right order.  Can this be done?  (How to instruct the Reader print window to make it come out that way?)

Answer 1

Daniel,
i meant to print out a "users' manual" in a more user-friendly format.
As you are doubtless aware, modern documentation is all in the form of a PDF, included on the distribution disk.  And the person who writes the manual obviously owns a paper mill, because the documentation goes on for hundreds of pages, a line or two in huge font size on each page.
So my hope is to print the "manual" out, four-up: four pages per side of output sheet (standard US printer paper, 8.5 x 11").  Accordingly, i might get pages 1, 3, 5 & 7 printed on the front side of the first sheet, say in quadrants 1, 2, 3 & 4.  Then i would need pages 2, 4, 6 & 8 printed on the reverse side of the output, in the following manner: directly behind page 1 would be page 2; behind page 3, page 4, and so on.  That would mean that the reverse of the output sheet would have pages in the following arrangement: quadrant one: (original) page 4;
"      two: page 2
"     three: page 8
"      four: page 6
(if i have it right).
i cannot believe that i am the first person to wish to be able to print out our present documentation in space- and paper-saving format and, given their wasteful font size, can still easily be read when shrunk by a factor of four (and requiring only an eighth of the number of sheets of printer paper).
So it would be a boon to humanity to cut down only an eighth as many trees in order to have hard copy (which i prefer, as it is handier and lets me write notes on it).
Now then, it has occurred to me to specify a very long input list of pages, arranged in weird sequence, in order to get the resultant output to print in useful manner (pages in right sequence - assuming that the input box would take such a long string of numbers) - but i ask: should that really be necessary?  Are the developers of Adobe's printer interface so remote from the world they serve?
I am hoping that someone has thought about n-up printing and how it would most likely be use, and has made provision for the rest of humanity to be able to conveniently and compactly print out logorrheic "user" documentation.
So i thank you for your reply, and say, let us search for a simple solution!
Regards,
Jim