[Scribus] Book guts and cover

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 11:28:16 +0100 (MET)
Peter Nermander <m8130 at abc.se> dijo:
> 
> Currently (as far as I know) Scribus will only import the first page of a PDF,
> and it will be imported as a bitmap image. Thus you will have to split your
> document into one PDF per page, and then import each page on its own. And it
> will consume a huge amount of memory, not to mention the size of the data to
> print.
> 
> I suggest you have a look at Multivalent and its impose function instead.
> http://multivalent.sourceforge.net

Thanks to all who suggested solutions. It looks like Scribus is not the
tool. I thought of Scribus because in the bad old days of using Windows
I would have done this in InDesign. InDesign has scripts which will
place multipage PDF files into a new InDesign file, then InDesign can
export the new file as an imposed PDF. I have done this in the past
because occasionally I need to print two copies on a letter size page
landscape to make two half-letter books at a time.

>From a cursory reading of the writeup on Multivalent it appears it will
do the job. Evidently I just download the multivalent.jar file and put
it somewhere, then run "multivalent" with the appropriate switches and
commands, right? And then I'll have to spend a few hours trying to
figure out the switches and commands to get it to make a new imposed
PDF file. 

I have Adobe Reader 7.08 installed on my computer, but its print dialog
box does not offer the printing options that others have suggested will
do the job. Note that this is not Adobe Reader on Windows. The Linux
version has a very rudimentary print dialog box. To make it print two
copies on one landscape sheet might be possible, but I'd have to use a
lp or lpr command to do so. I'm not even sure it could be done, and it
would take as long to learn how to write the command as it would to
learn how to use Multivalent, so I'm going to try to get Multivalent to
do the job first. I also looked at Kpdf, which has a better print
dialog box, but it still doesn't appear possible to make it print two
copies at a time on a landscape sheet.

I will use Scribus for the cover, however. That should be a simple,
straightforward layout and design job.