Printing a booklet?

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PaulL

Since Scribus is listed as the premier Linux alternative to Adobe InDesign, I made the mistake of assuming that there would be a "print booklet" feature.  Oops!

I want to print a booklet of eight half-sheet pages on both sides of two full-sized sheets of paper.
Since there doesn't appear to be any way to print two 5.5 x 8.5" pages on one 8.5 x 11" sheet (that would make things too easy! :D ), let me see if I have this right:

1. My original document is 5.5" wide and 8.5" tall.  So first, I have to create a document 11" wide x 8.5" tall, right?

2. Is there a columns feature to Scribus, or do I simply lay out guides manually and fit text boxes to them?

3. Can I drag the text frames from my 5.5 x 8.5" Scribus document into my 8.5 x 11" document?  I see there's a command to unlink them, which means I could drag them in the proper order, at least.

4. I am familiar with the process of imposing pages on signatures.  No help needed there.

And from there I assume it's just a matter of printing the pages in the correct order to form the booklet?  Or is there something I've missed?

If I had the time, I'd look at the source code and see what the chances are of adding in a booklet feature, but Easter is coming, and I have two Passion Gospels to print out, not to mention a number of service booklets. Even the ability to print two half-size pages on a full sheet of paper would be a blessing.  Oh, well.  "Cut and paste" used to be a literal term, maybe that's what I should do now.

Nermander

Scribus does not have any built in impositioning support, not even for booklet printing. The printing from Scribus is very unreliable, to the extent it has been suggested it is removed.

The most common suggestion is to export to PDF and use the booklet printing feature of the PDF viewer (most PDF viewers have this feature).

Another alternative is to use a separate PDF manipulation software like jPDFTweak to impose the PDF into a booklet.

P.S. I am not sure who lists it as the premier alternative to InDesign. InDesign has a lot of features Scribus does not yet have.

simpsonus

#2
the best solution I've found is pdfsnake. app but it would be great to have the option in Scribus to export to an imposed booklet. Acrobat booklet print feature is not a solution because it add the physical margin of the printer in the middle of the imposed page.

a.l.e

As far as I know, you can tell Acrobat Reader to print the PDF "as is", without scaling or adding additional margins (and this applies to all "simple" tools that can print an existing PDF as a booklet).

This having been said, we should better document which tools are available, what they can do, and which drawbacks they might have.

It would also be nice to have a simple external tool that only produces booklets.
I guess that the biggest challenge is to define the features to be supported!

Nermander

No, the N-up printing in Acrobat unfortunately does not allow you to manually set the scaling.

Today I mostly use jPDFtweak. It can be run with all settings in the command line, so you could make BAT files for the most common scenarios.

There is a page in the wiki about impositioning tools, but I don't think it is very up to date.