[texhax] pdfLaTeX 2-up A5 on A4

[Adrian F. Clark]

Every month, I prepare a short newsletter using pdfLaTeX of about
36pp.  It uses A5-sized paper and Charter fonts.  I need to print this
document 2-up on A4 paper with the pages re-ordered into a
"signature".  The recipe I've used until now on my Linux box goes
something like:

 acroread -toPostScript -level2 -size a4 mydoc.pdf | psbook |
   mpage -2 -bA4 -dp -o -k -m5

and works beautifully -- every other approach I've tried does
something awful to the font rendition.  The problem is that Adobe has
produced a new release of the Acrobat reader and this recipe no longer
works: acroread crashes.

The obvious replacement for acroread is pdf2ps but it gives warnings
like

     **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
                 But Times-Bold is not embedded.

which I suspect originates from a graphic I'm including (and have no
control over).

So my question is this: is there a free utility that I can use to
replace some or all of this recipe?  A solution that worked under
MacOSX would be ideal but a Linux one is also fine.

MTIA.

..Adrian
-- 
Dr Adrian F Clark           WEB: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alien/
EMAIL: alien/at/essex.ac.uk TEL: +44 1206 872432  FAX: +44 1206 872900
PAPER: VASE Lab, Dept ESE, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ,UK
"The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis
by an ugly fact"  --  Huxley