[PLUG] Working with PDF's

[Aaron Burt]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 09:15:03AM -0700, Robert Kopp wrote:
> --- "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb at cesmail.net>  wrote:
> 
> > How about Scribus?
> >
> I've heard about that. What I need to do is convert
> .doc to .pdf and then arrange the pages to look like a
> booklet, so the printer can use it in that form. 

Ah, thank you for describing what you want to do.

OpenOffice Writer makes nice PDFs from word-processing documents,
including Wicrosoft Merde .doc files.

But you'll actually have the easiest time if you can get your Webster
to print to a PostScript file.  That way, any formatting or layout
issues are entirely in that person's hands, rather than yours.

Typically, for a booklet layout, I use PSTools.  "psbook" rearranges a
Postscript file's page order to make booklets of various sizes.
By default, it assumes you're folding the whole stack of pages in
half, which at higher page-counts becomes impractical.  In those
cases, you can set the signature to a foldable number of pages,
such as 16.  The printer should be able to suggest a number.

I then use "psnup -2 -pletter" to rescale and arrange the pages 2-up
on letter-size paper.  The "impose" utility is also nice for this,
since it senses the actual document size and scales accordingly.

The printer will likely want PDF, so you can use ps2pdf or something to
convert the Postscript-format booklet into PDF.

This is all commandline stuff, which is nice since you can script it,
do it consistently and even automatically.

But who reads long emails anyway,
  Aaron