Postscript question for the incorrigible perfectionist (MacOS printing)

August 30, 2022 4:21 PM

I have a 310x115mm card, and I would like to make signatures (bi-fold booklets) that fit in the card, stapled to the spine when the card is folded in half, to make a 155x115mm landscape book. I have a duplex printer that can handle US legal paper, and a copy of Pages for MacOS.

The standard MacOS "Booklet" printing gets me pretty close (at least the page order is correct) but I can't figure out how to set margins and gutters appropriately so that the pages I want to staple into my card, are printed in the right place on each sheet of paper.

If you're a wiz at Pages and can point me to the right section of "Advanced" formatting, that'd be ideal. Or if you know of a Postscript utility (Linux / OpenSource is fine) that can do tumble compositing of individual 155x115mm Postscript pages (which I can get out of Pages), that'd be great too.

The closest I've gotten is to create my document on portrait-legal with wide top & bottom margins, then print as a booklet. But when Pages prints portrait legal sheets two-up onto a landscape legal page, it inserts a wide gutter between left and right pages, which means that there's too much gutter adjacent the staples. I can't figure out how to tell Pages to place facing pages next to each other, at the midline of the (landscape-oriented) legal sheet. It looks like the program wants to split the space evenly between inner and outer margins.

posted by spacewrench to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

If you've got a decent graphics app (Pixelmator, Affinity Photo/Design, Photoshop, etc.) you should be able to output the pages to PDF or as a flat rendered image and then combine them in the graphics app to print as a single combined page so you can easily nail the gutters. Once you've got the basics down, depending on the app it might be scriptable too...
posted by rambling wanderlust at 5:26 PM on August 30, 2022

Best answer: The classic tool to do this is pstops, from Angus Duggan's psutils. It's not much fun to use, but it does work. The only thing it won't do for you is page creep, which only matters if the signatures are thick
posted by scruss at 5:35 PM on August 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

pdfjam is a Swiss army knife of PDF manipulation which can do pretty much anything. It depends on LaTeX, and the learning curve is a cliff, but it can do anything. It's definitely possible to use it to position pages on paper very precisely. I've generally got it (or one of its wrappers) to work through a combination of trial and error and copying similar examples found online. It's a commandline tool, so it's automatable.

There used to be a wrapper script called pdfbook, which I previously used for making booklets, but the original wrappers are no longer maintained by the author (although they still exist and you could install them). There's a newer wrapper called pdfbook2, which has fewer options and isn't super well-maintained either, but the options may be good enough for your use case.
posted by confluency at 6:26 PM on August 30, 2022

Response by poster: After wrestling with pstops for a while, I think I've got a process that'll work. Thanks!
posted by spacewrench at 8:58 PM on August 30, 2022 [1 favorite]