How to rearrange A5 pages to get a book?

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24pm

I would like to make a book in A5 format. To do this I print tow A5 pages in A4 sheet in landscape layout and sew several sheets together to a book. Then sew all this small books to final big one.
The question is:
Is it possible to rearrange pages in Scribus (on printing or exporting to PDF) to get such small books. This ability allows to make a book with home printer?
So if we have the straight sequence of A5 pages during the edit: 1,2,3,4,5,6..16
The final A4 pages (made out of two A5 pages) should look like this: 16-1, 2-15, 14-3, 4-13 and so on.

Is it possible in Scribus?

tduell

I know your question specifically asked about solving your problem with Scribus, and that may be possible...hopefully others can answer that better than I.
There are a well proven set of tools for doing what you want to do...'psutils', a collection of powerful and useful tools for working with PostScript files.
They are command line tools, and I think available for most OS.
Note that there is also 'psutil', which isn't what you want.

Hope that helps,
Cheers,
Terry

Nermander

What you are asking for is called impositioning, Scribus does not have built in support but there are many other tools described in the wiki.
wiki.scribus.net/canvas/PDF,_PostScript_and_Imposition_tools


If you just want a booklet, export to PDF and use a recent version of Adobe Reader.
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/print-booklets-acrobat-reader.html


But for a book you might want to split into several signatures, the easiest tool I've found is one called Bookbinder. (Note that the last time I checked it the preview didn't work well, but the resulting PDFs were fine.)
http://www.quantumelephant.co.uk/bookbinder/bookbinder.html

Since Bookbinder is written in Java it is multi platform.


For more complex impositions (if you want more than four pages on a sheet) it's a bit harder, but there are some tools that can be useful.

For many years the "state of the art" for PDF impositioning seemed to be QuiteImposing+ for Adobe Acrobat, but I have used it and it's really not easy to work with.


There are some plans for including impositioning support into Scribus, but since there are external tools available it doesn't have high priority.

samps

Or....

The old fashioned way:

For a two-up booklet:

Take as many sheets of paper as you'll need for the whole book, bearing in mind that there will be 4 pages per sheet (don't forget any blank pages at start and finish, covers etc.) , and fold the stack of sheets in half to make a booklet of blank paper.
Now write the page numbers in the bottom of each sheet.
Unfold the stack and you have an impositioning plan that you can use to see which pages are to be printed adjecently. Then move your content around to suit.

For a four-up booklet you do pretty much the same but fold the stack twice.
You will notice that, when you unfold the stack, some of the pages are upside-down. Scribus can handle that.

But... the easy way is probably to use psnup from psutils and do all the impostioning on the end product pdf

Nermander

Quote from: samps on February 19, 2015, 09:02:30 AM
But... the easy way is probably to use psnup from psutils and do all the impostioning on the end product pdf

No, because that would mean you have to create a postscript file.

The tools I mentioned in my post all work on PDF files.

So those tools are the easy way, no need to use postscript tools when there are PDF tools for the task.

utnik


Dogil

There are some useful suggestions here. I have been doing this manually, mainly because for Artists "Zines" sometimes you want to have a smaller-then-A5 booklet but with page filling graphics, so you need to have some additional bleed around the outer edges.
I think the impositioning has traditionally been the job of the printshop, but in many cases you would want to do this yourself nowadays.
Just like typesetting has been a specialists job and it is part of DTP today. Good printers became much affordable and I believe that a Layout program should handle that sort of impositioning today. By the way, it seems that Adobe agrees and InDesign has this "print leaflet" function.
my 2ct.

Nermander

As been mentioned before: Even Adobe Reader can print a booklet. Adobe Reader can make a booklet out of any PDF, and Scribus can create PDFs.

So, just create a PDF from Scribus and use Adobe Reader to print your booklet.

Dogil

For a simple text only booklet there are plenty of tools, but when you want to do something more complex including bleed and crop marks, currently the method @samps described is the only way.

Nermander

I've said no before and I say no again. There is NO need to use the postscript stuff since there is stuff available that can do the very same thing with PDF.

With postscript you also (as far as I know) lose all color management in the document, which is not good.

From what I can tell for example pdfjam can do anything with a PDF that psutils can do with a postscript file.

Dogil

Quote from: Nermander on February 20, 2015, 10:32:28 AM
As been mentioned before: Even Adobe Reader can print a booklet. Adobe Reader can make a booklet out of any PDF, and Scribus can create PDFs.

So, just create a PDF from Scribus and use Adobe Reader to print your booklet.

Keep in mind that there is no more Adobe Reader for Linux.

utnik

Quote from: Dogil on July 01, 2016, 11:32:12 AMKeep in mind that there is no more Adobe Reader for Linux.


...but there's jpdftweak for all the usual platforms – compact and free!


utnik

Nermander

And there are probably a dozen other PDF viewers that can print booklets.