A4 Paper

A little while ago, I wrote about how to prepare a document for multi-page printing using the terminal. Today, I had to find a solution for printing a PDF in “booklet” mode, meaning that pages are printed so that, after folding the printed sheets in half and nesting them, the page order reads correctly. On Linux (Ubuntu), I use the pdfbook2 command — a wrapper around pdfjam that reorders pages for booklets. See the pdfjam documentation on CTAN (https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfjam) and the TeX Live distribution (https://tug.org/texlive/) for installation; on Debian/Ubuntu it’s usually available via the texlive-extra-utils package (https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=texlive-extra-utils). ...

It feels somewhat old-school to write a blog post about printing, but this is mainly a note-to-self and a reminder for others who want to print a poster with an A4 printer. I don’t print very often, but I had to print an A2-sized poster from home, where I only have an A4 printer. I couldn’t find any options to print across multiple pages in the Ubuntu printer dialogue. Testing on a Windows computer didn’t help either. But of course, there are terminal solutions. ...

I have been trying to create a booklet out of a standing A4 paper (the booklet size should be 105 x 297 mm), but this has proven to be much more difficult than I would have originally thought. It is a while since I have been doing things like this, and I still remember how easy it was to do such things back in the days when I used to use MS Publisher 1.0 for everything (that must have been the best MS program ever!). I also recall that creating brochures with PageMaker was a simple thing. ...