[Scribus] Imposition of PDF

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:56:51 +0200
Christoph Sch?fer <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de> dijo:

> what you need is either Multivalent PDF tools: 
> http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/index.html or pdftk: 
> http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

Christoph and Frank,

Thanks for the responses, but neither Multivalent PDF tools nor pdftk
will do what I need to do. I also tried a couple other things that I
found in the Ubuntu repositories, but all the tools seem to be designed
just for creating signatures, which is not what I need.

I also cannot figure out what Frank's script does, let alone how to
modify it. I am not a programmer and this job has to be done in a week,
so I don't have time to learn programming. And anyway, I am not
outputting from Scribus. I am not the one doing the layout and design
work. The designer is going to supply me with a 200 page PDF file, so I
need to create a new PDF file from an existing PDF file. God knows,
this would probably be a lot easier if I were doing the design and
layout work. For this job I am just the printer.

I think I did not make clear what the problem is. I need to place each
page twice on a landscape sheet:

front
|----------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                  1                |                   1               |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------------|

back
|----------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                  2                |                   2               |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------------|

The purpose is to print two books at the same time. After printing, the
books are cut apart with the guillotine before binding.

All the tools I can find will print n-up, but cannot place one page
more than one time. They are designed to do this:

front
|----------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                  4                |                   1               |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------------|

back
|----------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                  2                |                   3               |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|                                    |                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------------|

The second example is what most people think of when they think of
"imposition." Perhaps what I need is not called "imposition." I am not
creating signatures. I am just saving paper by printing two copies of a
book at the same time, one copy on each side of the sheet.

InDesign comes with scripts that will place individual pages of a PDF
file on pages in the InDesign document. You can specify where on the
page to place the PDF pages. So you run the script the first time,
telling it to place the pages on the left side of a landscape sheet.
Then you run the script a second time telling it to place the pages on
the right side of the sheet. Then you export to a new PDF file and
you're done. It works, but if I can find a tool that will do it
directly from PDF file to PDF file it would be even faster and simpler.

In this case at least I don't have to deal with color and screens. All
the artwork is vector and the document is being printed in black and
white.