Ian Douglas writes:

Have any ALUG members had any experience of printing books like this, and

if

so what DTP package did you use?

This sounds to me more like a print processing application, rather than DTP.

In Windows the best (imho) package for this type of thing is FinePrint. A google for "fineprint linux" shows several people asking for a Linux equivalent, and there are several answers (KDEPrint, for example; look for the Filters tab in the "properties" of the print dialog). A good place to start anyway.

DTP in Linux I've not played with but Scribus always gets a mention, so I'd look there too.

On 03-Dec-04 Ian Douglas wrote:

Hi Folks,

I have been asked by a friend to print a book of his for Christmas. The book will have 40 A5 size pages. I have created a text file from his hand-written manuscript and now want to print about 5 copies to pass to friends for proof reading and suggestions.

My problem is that I would like to find a Linux Desk Top Publishing (or Word Processing) program into which I can import the text file and print it out on landscape orientation A4 sheets with the first sheet automatically having A5 page 40 on it's left half and A5 page 1 on it's right half, the second sheet having page 2 on it's left half and page 39 on it's right, the third sheet having page 38 on it's left and page 3 on it's right etc (those of you who have printed booklets will hopefully know the problem I am trying to explain)...

Have any ALUG members had any experience of printing books like this, and if so what DTP package did you use?

Ian.

Hi Ian, Before embarking on the actual printing I would (myself) style it up nicely using groff (and since it's for Christmas I'd try to style it up *very* nicely!). [Don't under-rate groff -- it's an excellent DTP tool]

The output from that phase would be a PostScript file, corresponding to A4 paper, one page (1-40) per page.

Stage 2 is to re-order the pages using psbook (see "man psbook").

Stage 3 is to put the successive re-ordered pages two to each single a4 page (landscape orientation now) using psnup with "-2".

If you get your options right with psbook and psnup you will have solved exactly the problem you have stated.

Hi.

On Friday 03 Dec 2004 14:25, Ian Douglas wrote:

My problem is that I would like to find a Linux Desk Top Publishing (or Word Processing) program into which I can import the text file and print it out on landscape orientation A4 sheets with the first sheet automatically having A5 page 40 on it's left half and A5 page 1 on it's right half, the second sheet having page 2 on it's left half and page 39 on it's right, the third sheet having page 38 on it's left and page 3 on it's right etc (those of you who have printed booklets will hopefully know the problem I am trying to explain)...

Have any ALUG members had any experience of printing books like this, and if so what DTP package did you use?

KDEPrint includes 'Print pamphlet' filters which means you can turn anything you can print through KDE into a booklet (the printing term for this is 'imposition', btw).

Just print from your DTP / WP app through KDE print (the command is 'kprinter' if you're using an app that uses a different printing system by default but lets you specify your own print command, eg. xpdf, Firefox).

Then select 'Properties', click the 'Filters' tab, click the 'Add filter' icon (which looks like a funnel), and select a 'Pamphlet printing' filter. You can either do it in one pass if you've got a duplex printer, otherwise you'll have to do the even pages, re-insert your printed pages the other way round, and then print the odd pages on the backs.

Incidentally, the filter turns out to be using the following command:

psbook %filterinput | psnup -2 -p%psl | psselect -e %filteroutput

which is pretty much what other people here have suggested doing. Hopefully this is a slightly friendlier interface to all of that.

Hm, can anyone suggest a way of adjusting for 'creep' (ie. moving the margins inwards for the inner pages)?

If your friend's book's just simple text, OpenOffice Writer would probably be fine for laying out. If it's more complex then you might want to try Scribus. IMO it's not quite the Quark killer some have suggested, but it does most of what's required and doesn't crash nearly as often as it used to.

HTH,

Joe x