Home... Help... Search... Computers... BitsNpieces... Boats...
Making an A5 size booklet for a series of images
I needed to make a small booklet containing some illustrations as an addendum to a reprint of an old book (sadly, it did not include the original 19th century author's illustrations). After a lot of messing about, here is what I did. It may be useful to someone else. There is almost certainly a better way (Scribus, Lyx, Latex, .... ???) - if you know and it is not too hard, let me know, please!
This method uses Linux. Sorry, can't help you for Windows.
I like AFT, which this entire website is originally built with (till I switched to txt2tags). Having all the image files in the current folder I created an AFT source file
$ ls *.jpg > sneakPix.aft $ vi sneakPix.aft (to add text, and image tags)
Here is the resulting aft source file
$ aft sneakPix.aft
To do this I just opened the webpage in FireFox (on my Ubuntu PC) and printed to the built-in "PDF printer". This resulted in a PDF file in
~/PDF/PDF/Illustrations_for_Four_Months_in_a_Sneakbox_by_Nathaniel_Bishop.pdf.
I copied this to my current folder for convenience.
This is formatted for A4 paper.
We now need to turn this into an A5 size booklet, ie, printed 2-up and duplex on A4 paper and with the pages ordered so that on folding the finished sheets we get a booklet with the pages in the correct order.
I googled for help, and found a bash shell script called booklet.sh that does just what is needed. It relies on some utilities pdftops, psbook, pstops which are part of the poppler-utils and psutils packages. If you do not have these on your Linux box, you need to install them. If it is a Debian distribution, such as Ubuntu, then _sudo apt-get install poppler-utils psutils_ should do it.
$ ./booklet.sh Illustrations_for_Four_Months_in_a_Sneakbox_by_Nathaniel_Bishop.pdf
This creates a new PDF with "-booklet" appended to the file name.
I printed mine in my old HP PSC1315 All-In-1. Nothing fancy, and no built-in duplexing either.
I just opened it with the default PDF viewer (evince).
From this...
to this...
Here it is printed.
Folded
Open
Home... Help... Search... Computers... BitsNpieces... Boats...
This page tardus.net/a5booklet.html Last refreshed: 04 Oct 2023
Contact me, "Tardus" Copyright powered by txt2tags