[SOLVED] pagination

[weg]

We publish a bulletin some 120 pages of two faced sheets, printed
on both sides assembled with pairs of sheets wrapping previous
collated pages, from the center outward to the cover sheets.
Pagination is not sequential.  Rather, (in a random example) page
36 will be printed on the left and page 105 of the right facing
side.  Page 35 on the reverse side of 36 and 106 on the reverse
side of 105.  Indesign will do this; but is straining our limited
budget.  Will Scribus paginate as described?  If yes, give me
some guidance as where to research.  What I have read and watched
on of Scribus pagination has not shown me how.

[utnik]

hi weg

the usual way would be to layout your bulletin with 'facing pages' and to export a normal .pdf file.
the reordering of the pages (called 'imposition') is done later.
many .pdf readers have some built-in option for this (called 'booklet printing', 'booklet reorder' or something similar...)

if you print at home and neither your .pdf viewer nor your printer driver provides a booklet function, you might give jpdftweak a try. this is a small versatile .pdf manipulating program.

btw. with 120 pages you're hard at the limit for just fold-and-staple...

utnik

[Nermander]

jPDF Tweak takes a bit to get used to, but it does have pre-defined settings for booklets.

I was doing a small booklet for christmas now and actually did some testing.

The booklet printing in Acrobat will shrink pages a bit, as did the booklet printing supported by the printer driver.

jPDF Tweak on the other hand did a very nice imposition, but since I had not considered printer margins when I started the design that mean the page borders I had added were cropped, so I had to stick to Acrobat booklet printing.

But while testing, I also test printing pages grids to measure margins and centering, and then used jPDF Tweak to nudge the pages so they became better centered. I think jPDF Tweak supports being run from the command line too, if I was doing this on a regular basis I would probably make BAT files for doing the different actions.

[MrB]

When you export to PDF, you can reorder the pages for export. In the Export Range area of the PDF export dialog, select Choose Pages, then click on the ellipses button. Under Advanced reordering, you can select your page group size, typically this is 4. For a 24 page doc as an example, it will auto generate an export sequence of:
24,1,2,23,22,3,4,21,20,5,6,19,18,7,8,17,16,9,10,15,14,11,12,13

[weg]

Thank you all 3 for your replies.
I am a programmer, so had contemplated writing
a post pdf python apt to fill my requirement.
I thought something might already exist.
We will consider moving to Scribus with
some more testing.
BG

[a.l.e]

you can of course write a small python script that produces one or multiple pdfs with a specific range in them...

as inspiration, this is a somehow complex script that uses pdfjam to create different types of booklets:

https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-script-repository/blob/master/imposition/imposition.py

[weg]

I tested the export solution and that worked ... I have marked my question solved.
Thank you for the help.
Now I will be posting a question about export options.