GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 580285
Add booklet printing
Last modified: 2018-05-22 13:30:05 UTC
Booklet printing is when you print two-on-one page, but instead of wrapping on the top or left edge, you print the pages so that they form a booklet when the page is folded in two. For a 4 page document, this would be a first page with page 4/1, and a second page with page 2/3. This would be very nice to have, and i thank you in advance if you implement this. Friendly, Sven Luther
This is possible via (also piped) 1) convert to PS: pdftops document.pdf or pdf2ps document.pdf 2) resort pages: psbook document.ps book.ps 3) place 2 pages on on sheet: psnup -nup 2 book.ps booklet.ps 4) convert back to PDF: ps2pdf booklet.ps 5) rotate even pages: pdfmod booklet.pdf, select even, rotate twice in same direction, print/save However (!), not all is supported by this process. Special cases are: - printing e.g. B7 format as booklet on A4 without scaling (please let me know if you have found command-line solution) - printing trimmarks (optional) - matching alignment on pages - stap 5 should be automated
Also this is a possibility via LaTeX: \documentclass[a4paper,twoside]{article} \usepackage{pdfpages} \begin{document} \includepdf[ pages={-}, landscape, booklet, %signature=8, %fill out, is a multiple of 4 frame=true, nup=2x1, noautoscale=true, scale=0.59, % for B7 scale= 1.00 delta=0cm 0.2cm, offset=0cm 0cm ] {document.pdf} \end{document}
Important note: when printing a booklet with Evince, make sure that "Auto Rotate and Center" on the third tab pane of the print dialogue is not selected. Otherwise half of the pages will end up upside down in the final result.
For anyone interested, there are instructions in the evince documentation on how to do this.
(In reply to comment #4) > For anyone interested, there are instructions in the evince documentation on > how to do this. Indeed, but it is more a workaround, than a solution. Rather than searching the documentation what is the proper order of pages for my particular document, I reopen it in acroread -- or print it not as a booklet and then regret it ... I didn't read evince sources, but is this really so hard? (I would guess it is about as hard as to produce documentation with special sections for each file size) Alternatively: a good workaround would be to allow "printing" by means of calling a custom script, then booklet printing could probably be cooked using pdftk and such ... Thanks for consideration, there really are people sorely missing this feature.
Perhaps someone would like to make test cases covering all what has been discussed here in order to see what needs to be changed to evince. Also this can be used for regression testing of this matter later on.
The evince documentation on this is here: http://library.gnome.org/users/evince/stable/print-booklet.html.en That shows how to do it manually. But the process is laborious and should be automated. The big quirk is dealing with printers which only print one side, and the user experience for prompting them to put the printed pages back in again. If we only want to deal with the double-sided case, here's a quick spec for what I think evince should do: * Add a checkbox next to "Collate" and "Reverse" which says "Booklet", which is only enabled when "Two-sided" is set to "Short Edge (flip)", and has mouseover text explaining that. Checking that checkbox does the following: * Expands the document by adding blank pages to the end to make the number of pages a multiple of four (these could either be added in the document display itself, or simply added as data is being sent to the printer) * Switches to 2 pages per side if the value is 1 page per side * Switches the Range to "Pages" * Appropriately populates the page range text field according the formula here: http://library.gnome.org/users/evince/stable/duplex-npage.html.en * Disables the "Range" field and the page range text field Unchecking the check box would remove the blank pages, re-enable the fields and restore their previous values. That would do the trick. Gerv
I feel sorry to insist, but I claim this is an ESSENTIAL feature which must be added to evince. Before it existed in acrobat reader, I was doing it myself with psnup, quite often..., however now I'm getting old and busy and can't afford to spend minutes each time I print a document. And booklet printing is essential, it saves paper, weight when you need to travel with many printed documents, etc. Now, Evince has become a great document viewer, much lighter and better than acroread, however the only reason for which I still need acroread (maybe up to a few enhancements with forms) on my system IS booklet printing. And I really would prefer not to install it (also because it does not support 64-bits systems so you need to install a lot of extra libraries...). So I really believe you should consider this "gadget" as essential Thanks for the development of this nice product. PS : of course, as in acroread, it is enough to assume the printer has a duplex unit...
I use booklet printing constantly, so one button booklet printing is a must have feature for me. Unfortunately, https://askubuntu.com/questions/767937/how-to-install-adobe-acrobat-in-ubuntu-16-04 is the only usable option for now. Could we make a GSoC project proposal for this feature?
Booklet seems to a be a special case of printing multiple pages per side because sounds like pre-defined settings that should work. In the help of Adobe there are nice icons that can guide the user the formatting expected to be printed: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/print-booklets-acrobat-reader.html Nevertheless, I always find tricky to print multiple pages when using a duplex printer, and I hardly believe this would solve it but it may alleviate the user interaction.
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