[SOLVED] Pagination of large documents

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bigal

I have a 380 page A4 PDF document that I want to use practice with which I wish to practice bookbinding. The document contains text, headers and footers and page numbers as well as notes and images as well as some graphs. This would normally require assembling onto double sided A3 paper size to enable four pages to be printed on each piece of paper and the output to be correctly paginated. I do not have access to an A3 printer so have decided that I need to reduce the page size to A5 so the output will be 4 pages to each A4 piece of paper.

So my first question is does anyone know of an open source program I canuse to reduce the default PDF from A4 to A5. I have tried LibreOffice Impress but that does not work.

My second question concerns pagination. I understand this is not possible using Scribus so is there an open source program that I can use to properly paginate this document please.
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

Nermander


bigal

Thank you for the suggestions Nermander. I will do some 'Reading up' in both of the links you provided. It seems I have a lot to learn.
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

bigal

As I noted in my original post, I am using this large PDF as my first experiment into book binding. Thanks to the suggestions above as well as a lot of reading I have converted the original A4 document to A5 and rendered the pages so that there are four A5 pages to each A4 sheet. They print out in the correct page order (I am only printing 5 sheets of paper each time I tested my work to save both paper and ink). These 5 sheets results in 20 A5 pages. Running Imposition software leaves all A5 pages in the correct order apart from the first.

On the first sheet of paper the right hand side has, quite correctly, page 1 printed on it. However the left side has page 2. This means that when all 5 A4 sheets are folded to make up a signature page 2 is at the back. It should, of course, be on the reverse of page 1. The remaining pages are all in the correct order.

Forgive me if my terminology is incorrect, this is just the start of my bookbinding learning curve. As the entire book will be very large, I intend to split it up into signatures each of 10 pieces of paper. I will add 2 blank A5 pages at the front for my use as well as some at the end to make the total page count divisible by 4. The problem is that the left page on the first sheet of paper of each signature will end up, when folded, as the last page of that signature rather than the second.

Try as I might I cannot see any way around this. For the avoidance of doubt I am running Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia using a Cinnamon desktop.

I am using the following software.

LibreOffice Writer
booklerimposer
PDF Arranger
PDFSAM

I seem completely tied up and cannot now find my way out of the trees. Can anyone help please?
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

Nermander

It sounds as if you need to tell the imposition software to order the pages differently.

Can you show the settings/options you use to impose the pages?

bigal

Hi Nermander,

At my age I had hoped that I had learned not to assume. Apparently that is a lesson I must still learn. The imposition software I use, bookletmaker, has three options.

  • Produce a booklet out of a linear document
  • Produce a linear document out of a booklet
  • Put multiple input pages on one output sheet

Each option has a little graphic to illustrate the type of result that can be expected. I assumed that the third option was the one I needed and failed to look beyond the end of my nose. I failed to explore or even look at the others.

After your question I experimented using the first option. Problem solved. I apologise for taking up your time but thank you for taking that time and pointing me in the right direction. To quote someone else, I will try to do better next time.
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

MrB

You can export from Scribus in whatever page order you want.
On the PDF export window, under Export Range, select Choose Pages, click the ellipses...,
On the first tab, you can put in whatever sort order you want.. or use Advanced Reordering and then choose your page group size, likely 4 (the default).
That will give you page order 380,1,2,379,378,3,4... etc

bigal

Thank you for the additional information MrB. That was an aspect of Scribus I was not aware of so something learned today so all to the good for me.

As an experiment I used Scribus to open a 124 page PDF document. I know that my desktop machine is fairly old  but never the less it took over 20 minutes to load. I followed your instructions and exported it as a fresh PDF. That seemed to go well and once the completed file was available I opened with my usual  document viewer, Xreader 4.0.2,  (called Document viewer in the Mint menu system) standard in Linux Mint Cinnamon. The first thing I wanted to do was check the document properties so went to to File>Properties. It soon became obvious that there was a problem as the program ceased to be usable. Document properties were not available. I managed to close the file and Document viewer then deleted the file and restarted the whole process from Scribus. Unfortunately the results were the same. I can only conclude that this is an aspect of Scribus that is not quite as robust as I had expected and that the exported file had, somehow, been corrupted.

In any case, everything was far too slow so the method I outlined in my previous post will be the one I am using. Never the less, I do thank you for the very clear instructions. That method of printing will, I am sure, be useful in the future with my normal Scribus documents.
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

Nermander

PDFs exported from Scribus are usually of very good quality.

Try another PDF viewer. The reference is Adobe Reader but it is unfortunately not available for Linux.


AdmFubar

Quote from: bigal on February 20, 2024, 12:03:00 PMAs an experiment I used Scribus to open a 124 page PDF document. I know that my desktop machine is fairly old  but never the less it took over 20 minutes to load.
What are the specs of your machine, cpu type, clock speed, and amount of ram, plus the harddrive(s) specs?
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

MrB

If you have a way to share the PDF, others could test it on their machines if thats the only machine and only operating system you have. I suspect the PDF reader as exporting in order or out of order should not matter. We should confirm your document is not otherwise surfacing a problem, because we have not seen issues with out of order exports in the past.

bigal

Machine details are as follows.

System:
  Kernel: 5.15.0-94-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.4.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 6.0.4
    tk: GTK 3.24.33 wm: muffin vt: 7 dm: LightDM 1.30.0 Distro: Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia
    base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: HP-Pavilion product: FL230AA-ABU a6525.uk v: N/A
    serial: <superuser required> Chassis: Hewlett-Packard type: 3 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: N/A model: NARRA3 v: 3.02 serial: <superuser required> BIOS: Phoenix v: 5.13
    date: 05/02/2008
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ bits: 64 type: MCP smt: <unsupported>
    arch: K8 rev.F+ rev: 2 cache: L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 2400 min/max: 1000/2400 cores: 1: 2400 2: 2400 bogomips: 9644
  Flags: ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 svm
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RV620 LE [Radeon HD 3450] vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: radeon v: kernel pcie:
    speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: DVI-I-1 empty: VGA-1 bus-ID: 02:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:95c5
    class-ID: 0300
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.4 driver: X: loaded: ati,radeon
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa gpu: radeon display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 508x285mm (20.0x11.2") s-diag: 582mm (22.9")
  Monitor-1: DVI-0 mapped: DVI-I-1 model: Acer S230HL serial: <filter> res: 1920x1080 hz: 60
    dpi: 96 size: 509x286mm (20.0x11.3") diag: 584mm (23") modes: max: 1920x1080 min: 720x400
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RV620 (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.15.0-94-generic LLVM 15.0.7)
    v: 3.3 Mesa 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: NVIDIA MCP61 High Definition Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:05.0 chip-ID: 10de:03f0 class-ID: 0403
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-94-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: NVIDIA MCP61 Ethernet vendor: Hewlett-Packard type: network bridge driver: forcedeth
    v: kernel port: ec00 bus-ID: 00:07.0 chip-ID: 10de:03ef class-ID: 0680
  IF: enp0s7 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 912.89 GiB used: 257.08 GiB (28.2%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: A-Data model: SU630 size: 447.13 GiB speed: 1.5 Gb/s type: SSD
    serial: <filter> rev: 017a scheme: MBR
  ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: Crucial model: CT500MX500SSD1 size: 465.76 GiB speed: 3.0 Gb/s
    type: SSD serial: <filter> rev: 023 scheme: MBR
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 82.5 GiB used: 11.6 GiB (14.1%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda7
  ID-2: /boot size: 46.63 GiB used: 285.3 MiB (0.6%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda6
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 19.06 GiB used: 6.2 MiB (0.0%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sda5
  ID-4: /home size: 207.07 GiB used: 3.32 GiB (1.6%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda9
  ID-5: /var size: 82.66 GiB used: 2.37 GiB (2.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda8
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 512 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 file: /swapfile
USB:
  Hub-1: 1-0:1 info: Full speed or root hub ports: 10 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s chip-ID: 1d6b:0002
    class-ID: 0900
  Device-1: 1-8:3 info: Alcor Micro AU6375 4-LUN card reader type: Mass Storage
    driver: usb-storage interfaces: 1 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s power: 100mA chip-ID: 058f:6377
    class-ID: 0806 serial: <filter>
  Hub-2: 2-0:1 info: Full speed or root hub ports: 10 rev: 1.1 speed: 12 Mb/s chip-ID: 1d6b:0001
    class-ID: 0900
  Device-1: 2-2:2 info: MosArt 2 4Ghz Wireless Transceiver [for Delux M618 Plus Vertical Mouse]
    type: Keyboard,Mouse driver: hid-generic,usbhid interfaces: 2 rev: 1.1 speed: 12 Mb/s
    power: 100mA chip-ID: 062a:4c01 class-ID: 0301
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 38.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Repos:
  Packages: apt: 2656
  No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/apandada1-brightness-controller-jammy.list
    1: deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/apandada1-brightness-controller-jammy.gpg] https: //ppa.launchpadcontent.net/apandada1/brightness-controller/ubuntu jammy main
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
    1: deb http: //linux-mint.froonix.org virginia main upstream import backport
    2: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy main restricted universe multiverse
    3: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
    4: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
    5: deb http: //security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openshot_developers-ppa-jammy.list
    1: deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/openshot_developers-ppa-jammy.gpg] https: //ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openshot.developers/ppa/ubuntu jammy main
Info:
  Processes: 245 Uptime: 10m wakeups: 0 Memory: 2.9 GiB used: 1.56 GiB (53.9%) Init: systemd
  v: 249 runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.4.0 alt: 11/12 Client: Unknown python3.10 client
  inxi: 3.3.13


Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

bigal

The PDF exported from Scribus is the only one I have ever had problems with. The Mint document reader is the default and comes with every installation of Mint  and is very stable, as does the full open source office program LibreOffice. My downloaded file is 21.7MB and therefore probably too large to be uploaded to the forum. (Also I would not know how to do that.) It is available from the Mint download page here (You must look for the Writer Guide there) :-

Linux Mint 7.3 Cinnamon

I suspect however you would rather look at my downloaded version rather than download your own. However I do not think my file will be of much use. It opens quite correctly, I can print any part of it I want, isolate any page I want and view all the properties. I can make as many copies as I want an load them on any of my other machines so I do not see that there is a problem with the file.

All of this started out with me wanting a large document that I could use to practice and learn about bookbinding. I struck the pagination problem and thanks to the help I have received from this forum I have solved the issue I was having. On my other forums I can usually amend the topic heading as [SOLVED] to enable others to quickly see that there might be a solution to their problem contained within. I cannot see such a facility on the Scribus forum. Is there one please?
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

AdmFubar

Quote from: bigal on February 21, 2024, 07:07:42 AMMachine details are as follows.

Info:
  Processes: 245 Uptime: 10m wakeups: 0 Memory: 2.9 GiB used: 1.56 GiB (53.9%) Init: systemd
  v: 249 runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.4.0 alt: 11/12 Client: Unknown python3.10 client
  inxi: 3.3.13



if i'm reading this right, 3gb of ram? there is the problem
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

a.l.e

I have now added (ok, created) a mod with a [SOLVED] button, you can use to mark a topic as solved.

You're welcome to try it out : - )