Printing an A5 booklet

Yup, a break from LDAP :-) Instead I got to help with the kinder newsletter. They wanted it done as an A5 booklet (you know, printed 2 pages per sheet of A4 then folder over). After wrestling OpenOffice (I tried setting an A4 page in landscape and dividing it into 2 - it was verrry hard, and ended up not working too well anyway) I discovered someone had already solved the problem far more elegantly than I could.

This person has the best summary:

$ psbook print.ps out.ps
$ psnup -2 out.ps > out2up.ps

I had a lot of trouble convincing the stupid printer software on Linux to multiple copies to my HP LaserJet (that's an annoyance to track down another day) and I also have no duplex unit, so I ended up printing pages 1 and 3, then flipping those over, putting them back in the feed bin, and printing pages 2 and 4 on the other side of that. I split pages 1 & 3 and 2 & 4 by opening the postscript, then printing just page 1 & 3 to a new postscript file, then same again for 2 & 4. Then printed with:


$ lp -n 70 -d HPLaserJet -o Collate=True pages1and3.ps
$ lpr -n 70 -d HPLaserJet -o Collate=True pages2and4.ps