[Scribus] imposition

[Frank Cox]

I have been working on this more-or-less exclusively for the past 24
hours and I'm no further ahead on it than I was at this time
yesterday.

I'm attempting to take a 40-page Scribus document and create a PDF in
what is apparently (according to the layout diagram I'm working from)
called a 40-page ponytab.

This is to make a series of 10 plates of 4 letter-size pages each, so
I ultimately want to make a 10-page PDF of 22"x17" pages.

My reading has lead me to believe that the way to get where I want to
be is by using the psutils toolset and working with Postscript output
from Scribus.

Therefore, I have printed to a file and created a Postscript document that way.

However, I have run into several problems when using the psnup program.

First, no matter what I specify for the -h and -w sizes, I always seem
to get an 8.5x11" page size for output.  At least, I think I do
because that's what I see when I look at the postscript output file
from psnup after trying various comandlines to process my document. 
In addition, no matter what I specify for orientation (-r, -l) the
output is always in landscape orientation.

Now, I'm not entirely certain that my page size is 8.5x11 on the
output end because when I specify a larger page size and view the
result with ggv I see only part of the printed page on my screen and
the rest of the page is gone.  Maybe it is working - how do you view a
Postscript page if ggv doesn't work?  I tried converting it using
ps2pdf and viewing that with xpdf and got only 8.5x11 pages there as
well so I suspect that it's the actual ps output file size that's
saying 8.5x11 only.

Simple example commandline:

psnup -w11in -h17in -Pletter -2 -r file.ps test.ps

This gives me letter-size output, not 11x17 as one would expect.  Two
half-sized pages on one letter-size sheet.

psnup -w11in -h17in -2 -r file.ps test.ps

gives me only about a quarter of each page's text on each sheet, still 8.5x11.

What am I doing wrong here?  Is there a better way to do this layout? 
I tried using http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/ to directly work
with the pdf file that Scribus can create and that looked like the
real thing as it has a Impose tool that theoretically will do exactly
what I want to have happen all in one handy step.  This commandline
should take the PDF and directly write it to a new PDF that is exactly
what I want.
START OF COMMANDLINE
according to my reading of the documentation:  java -classpath
Multivalent20040415.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x2 -verbose -paper 22x17
in -layout '20r,1l,21r,40l,12r,9l,29r,32l,18r,3l,23r,38l,16r,5l,25r,36l,10r,11l,31r,30l,2r,19l,39r,22l,6r,15l,35r,26l,4r,17l,37r,24l,13t,28l,8l,44l,27r,14l,34r,7l'
black.pdf
END OF COMMANDLINE

Sadly, it crashes with the highly informative error message "null". 
Yes, that's all it says.  It's not just the PDF from Scribus that says
"null"; I've tried it with other pdf's and shorter commandlines and
everything that I can think of.  "null".

I'm open to any suggestions that any of you may have.  Is it possible
to do this "40 page ponytab" on Linux using the output from Scribus in
some way?