Add booklet printing capabilities via PDF Services

Feb 21, '05 08:52:00AM

Contributed by: DougEdwards47

This hint sets up "booklet style" printing to be accessible as a PDF workflow from the standard print dialogue. Booklet formats are common for publishing newsletters, etc., and involve imaging two pages to each side of a sheet of paper. The sheets are then collated, folded and stapled in the middle. The script will be particularly useful for users of Apple's new Pages (part of iWork) application.

The number of pages in the booklet is known as the signature of the book. For example, a booklet of signature 8 will print onto two sheets (front and back) in the following order:

  1. Sheet 1 front side: pages 8 and 1
  2. Sheet 1 reverse side: pages 2 and 7
  3. Sheet 2 front side: pages 6 and 3
  4. Sheet 2 reverse side: pages 4 and 5.
A book of 80 pages with "perfect binding" and a signature of 8 will have 10 bundles of 8 pages.

I came to write this script because I had suggested to my wife that she use Pages for producing her local Church magazine. She had a look and said it was no good because it couldn't produce booklet format, unlike MS Publisher. Thinking about it, I realised that this ability should not be wired into the application, but should be part of the printing infrastructure available to all applications.

In the Unix world, there is a set of PostScript utilities, psutils, that can be used to manipulate any PostScript document and can be used to produce a Booklet layout. Unfortunately, most of the programs in psutils do not work well with CUPS. However, most of the functionality of psutils can be obtained by passing options to CUPS -- all except psbook, which does the rearrangement of pages. This is presumably why there is no booklet layout option in print dialogues. Fortunately, psbook is the one utility that appears not to break CUPS.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, and I'm not sure, but you may have to make the script executable (chmod 755 script_name) first.]

Comments (20)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005021608303265