[scribus] Printing two pages across?

[John Culleton]

On Monday 20 September 2010 16:23:06 Jim Ford wrote:
> I want to produce a test book of 18 pages on an A4 Epson inkjet
> printer. It's a children's illustrated book, and because it will
> have some illustrations as two page spreads, there will be no
> margins.
>
> I will tackle imposition by stapling the right number of pages
> together using scrap paper, and then numbering and drawing rough
> illustrations to identify the pages, before taking it apart to
> produce patterns for printing. This is the only way I can get my
> head round this step!
>
> Can anyone, who's probably tackled this themselves, think of a
> printing 'workflow', to produce the double width pages correctly
> printed such that the double page spread illustrations match up
> neatly. Ideally, this could be done by getting Adobe Reader to
> print two pages at a time without a gap between them, but it
> doesn't appear that this can be done - but maybe there's another
> PDF printing application that can do this?
>
> I'd be most grateful for any help at all in this matter!
>
> Jim
>


On Linux I use PostScript utilities from PSUtil for this task. Here is 
the script I have used for years to take any arbitrary Postscript file 
containing  8.5 x 11 pages and impose it on 11 x 17 pages.:

psbook $1.ps $1b.ps
echo 'psnup'
psnup -2 -ptabloid -Pletter $1b.ps $1p.ps
echo 'psselect'
psselect -o   $1p.ps $1o.ps
psselect -e -r  $1p.ps $1e.ps
#lpr $1o.ps
#echo 'switch paper'
#read x
#lpr $1e.ps
#rm $1p.ps $1e.ps $1o.ps $1b.ps

The script is called with the name of the original Postscript file, 
less the .ps suffix. File foo.ps  is called with:
script1a foo.

My printer will handle big paper but won't duplex.  The paper feed is 
such that the even pages are put out in reverse order. These things 
would need to be altered for a different printer. 

I should mention that the Context version of TeX has built in 
imposition. But it would be tedious to feed the output of Scribus into 
a Context source file.



-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
Printable E-book 38 pages $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html