Editing Creating a booklet

Taken from [http://www.peppertop.com/blog/?p=35]

It is very important to check the result of each step. Each pdf may yield a different result in the sucesive coversions. 


== Ensure that “psutils” is installed on your machine.== 

On a Ubuntu box this package is available via the usual repositories. You also need the “ps2pdf” and “pdf2ps” utilities that are part of Ghostscript, but they are usually installed by default on a Linux box anyway.

== pdf ==> postcript ==

Use “pdf2ps” to convert your PDF file into a postscript file:

 pdf2ps myfile.pdf

== Reorder pages with psbook ==

Use “psbook” to re-order the pages of the file to make a “signature” (i.e. put the pages in the right order so that when you fold your A4 sheets in half you can read them as a booklet):

 psbook myfile.ps myfile_book.ps

== Scale to fit 2 pages per A4 page ==

Use “psnup” to scale the A4 pages to A5 and place them 2-up onto an A4 page. 

The secret here – and the bit I always forget – is to override psnup’s automatic scaling by forcing it to use a scale of 1:1 (the -s1 part). 
That said, you should double-check that this is actually what you want to do – sometimes you can get better results by leaving out the “-s1″ switch, or by specifying a different scale factor (e.g. “-s0.9″ or “-s1.1″):

 psnup -s1 -2 myfile_book.ps myfile_booklet.ps

 psnup -2 myfile_book.ps myfile_booklet.ps

== Postscript ==> pdf ==

Finally you can convert the postscript file back into a PDF, if you need to, for subsequent viewing or printing (the command below will produce a final output file called “myfile_booklet.pdf”):

 ps2pdf myfile_booklet.ps

That’s the step-by-step, which is useful if you need to further manipulate the file in-between steps. If all you want to do is convert an A4 pdf to a booklet version of the same, however, then just use the all-in-one command line, replacing the filenames at the start and end as appropriate:

 pdf2ps myfile.pdf - | psbook | psnup -s1 -2 | ps2pdf - myfile_booklet.pdf

[[User:Rgarcia|Rgarcia]] 12:54, 24 April 2014 (CEST)