[pdftex] producing a5 booklets from a4

[Hans Hagen]

At 03:12 PM 10/8/2002 +0100, Kester Clegg wrote:
>Ricardo Sanchez Carmenes <carmenes at bioinf.medicina.uniovi.es> writes:
>
>[...]
>
> > > Are there any pdf utilities that can help me produce properly formatted
> > > a5 booklets from a4 pdf?
> >
> > I use sucessfully the following pipe:
> >
> > cat the_pdf_file.pdf | acroread -toPostScript -level2 -size a4 |
> > psbook | psnup -pa4 -2

does this mean that your original is A4? if so use

texexec --pdfarr --paper=A4A3 --print=up yourfile

and print from acrobat on A4

[actually if you look in the produced texexec.tex you see what happens]

>Thanks Ricardo - this does work (perfectly), and I retested texexec
>using the same file and a newer, better printer and I got the same
>problems as mentioned earlier.  The problem is definitely with texexec's
>rearrangement.  It seems a shame we have to rely on acroread to do an

it's not that bad -) here we can safely rely on tex doin gthe job; also, 
fyi, context users do it slightly different:

- they can specify the arrangement in the source doc
- and run texexec --arr ... if they want an arranged version

>accurate translation of the pdf to ps and then use the psutils to get
>our booklet.  There ought to be a way of working with the pdf
>directly... but I guess that would involve Angus porting his psutils to
>pdf, which seems a tad unlikely.  ;-)

... or reading a bit about the matter in one of the context manuals ...

btw, i have plans to make a more gui based interface to this mechanism, 
which will go into the context distribution

Hans
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