HOW ARE YOU (LADIES AND) GENTLEMEN!!!!

Background:

I've been experimenting with desktop publishing using LibreOffice. The object is to print a foldable booklet on 8.5"x11" paper. So I laid out the document on 6.5"x8.5" pages, thinking that I would then "print" them to .PDF side-by-side, on 8.5x11 paper, in the correct page order to make a booklet, and then physically print those .pdfs front and back, for a grand total of four pages per sheet -- arrange them in the correct order, fold in half, and voilà: a booklet with pages you can turn.

The Problem:

No matter how I try to do it, I always end up with these huge margins at the top and bottom of the .pdf files. All the text is there, but it doesn't seem to have rendered at its full size. I have tried printing to PDF from LibreOffice and exporting a .pdf with the small-size pages and trying to print that to another .pdf from Evince. I also installed the cups-pdf virtual printer, which has the same problem. So it would seem that the fault lies in some common .pdf rendering software that all those functions are using.

The Question:

Is it possible to edit the settings for cups-pdf (or whatever common program is being used) and set the margins to zero? If so, how the heck would I go about doing that? It sounds a lot like rewriting a printer driver, which involves Deep Magic.

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

You can't do zero margins on any printer I am aware of. You can do smaller ones. Particularly top and bottom cannopt be zero; Top because the page is just arriving, and bottom because no printer can hold a page in position right to the end. So you need some side margin, or it looks weird.

Try your luck with ghostscript (man gs). That can print also.

welcome to you, too.
i resent your usage of brackets (and capitals, and exclamation marks).
but nevermind.

why would you do it like this?
i'm not sure i understand, but it seems that this doubles your margins.
why don't you just print the .odt document?

i rarely use a printer, but i remember a setting to "ignore margins", or a warning that "part of the document is outside margins" - which can then be ignored.
but of course it will never result in total zero margin.