[scribus] Printing two pages across?

Peter Nermander peter at nermander.se
Tue Sep 21 07:14:55 CEST 2010


> Can anyone, who's probably tackled this themselves, think of a printing
> 'workflow', to produce the double width pages correctly printed such
> that the double page spread illustrations match up neatly. Ideally, this
> could be done by getting Adobe Reader to print two pages at a time
> without a gap between them, but it doesn't appear that this can be done
> - but maybe there's another PDF printing application that can do this?

Search the Scribus wiki for "imposition" (because that is what the
task you want to perform is called).
Or google "pdf imposition" or similar.

There are several ways you can do it, some examples include:

- Using Multivalent Impose tool
- Printing 2-up from Adobe Reader (with custom page order)
- Shuffle pages using an external application and then print 2-up from
Adobe Reader
- Get Adobe Acrobat and for example Quite Imposing
- Go by postscript using psutils and then back to PDF
- Using your printers or printer drivers built in support for booklet
printing (if it has such support)

But almost none of them include Scribus in the workflow, most of them
work on PDF. So the task is not Scribus-specific.

You will have to check them out and see which one suits you best. I'd
say Adobe Reader and a PDF printer driver is probably the easiest.
Multivalent probably comes second.

Both these create a new PDF, so you can verify the result without
printing if (saves paper). When the PDF looks correct you can try to
print it.

For testing the different methods I suggest you create a test document.

Make a template page (I would use one or two master pages) with two
boxes drawn. One box at the page margin and one box 1-2 cm from the
edgde. The first box is to be able to see whether pages are cropped or
not and if there is gap between them. The second box is to be able to
measure how much is cropped if pages get cropped.

Put a big page number in the center of the page.

Now you have a document you can test with, to get the result you want.
Take frequent notes of what you do to be able to repeat the process.

Also note that 18 pages will NOT work (each sheet will have 4 pages, 2
on front and 2 on back, so 4, 8, 16, 20, 24 etc are needed).

/Peter



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