[Scribus] advanced booklet printing

[Tino Schwarze]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 05:02:44PM +0200, Martin Tlustos wrote:

> my system is Suse 10.0 with the normal YOU updates, no big extras.
> Could someone help me with this: I want to layout a booklet in A5 and print it 
> in two versions: one for sending via email (without booklet reordering so it 
> is easier to read on screen), one with booklet reordering (for printing). 
> 
> In the wiki I found the howto about booklet printing via kprinter. That works 
> nice if I start with A4 pages, but I want to start with A5 and just reorder 
> the pages so that when printed they come out like a booklet. I don't want to 
> start with A4 because the bigger images will cause the pdf's to be much 
> bigger.

Have a look at multivalent. It can do that sort of things (rearranging
pages, mapping 2 A5 to 1 A4 etc.)

You might also find the attached script helpful for preparing the mail
version since Scribus' PDF output is optimized for maximum quality, not
size. You need Ghostscript 8.5+ and xpdf for the script to work.

Ghostscript 8.5+ is recommended anyway for serious work, so you
might want to build it yourself, it's not difficult and you also need
xpdf (for the pdftops tool).

HTH,

Tino.

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#!/bin/bash
#
# Optimizes a PDF for Web viewing.
#
# You might want to resample images to 72dpi when creating the PDF.
#
# Required tools: 
# - pdftops from xpdf
# - ghostscript 8.5+

function help()
{
	echo "Syntax: `basename $0` input.pdf [output.pdf]"
	exit 1
}

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
	help
fi

if [ ! -r "$1" ] ; then
	echo "Cannot read $1"
	exit 1
fi

infile="$1"
outfile="$2"

[ -n "$outfile" ] || outfile="${1/.pdf/-mail.pdf}"

[ "$infile" = "$outfile" ] && { echo "Please specify output file different from input file." ; exit 1 ; }

echo "Optimizing $infile to $outfile ..."
pdftops -level3 -paper match "$infile" - | gsc -q -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -sOutputFile="$outfile" -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -c .setpdfwrite -
#-dColorImageResolution=75 -dGrayImageResolution=150 -dMonoImageResolution=150 -c .setpdfwrite -v -sOutputFile="$outfile" -

if [ "$3" = "-lin" ] ; then
	linfile="${outfile/.pdf/-lin.pdf}"

	echo "Linearizing PDF..."
	pdfopt "$outfile" "$linfile"
fi