psnup allows to have multiple pages per sheet in a postscript file. I have printed a book called The Art Of Unix Programming from Eric Steven Raymond. It has 540 pages, so I decided to print two pages per one sheet of paper and use double side.
psnup works with postscript (ps) files, but I had a pdf file; using acroread converted the pdf file to a ps file by just printing it to a file. Another approach is to use pdf2ps from GNU Ghostscript.
As the ps file didn't have any number as footer or header, I had to put them on it. As I got tired of searching for a tool that accomplish that task, I decided to put them with an editor. I don't know the postscript language (And I don't want to learn) but it took me some minutes to notice that the following code will put the numbers:
280 17 m
(17)
[10.1078 7 10.892 6.21579 ] pdfxs
where (17) is the page number. There is a ps command that tells which number page you are in:
%%Page: 17 17
Then I created a vi macro (Vim the editor, http://www.vim.org) with qq (start 'q' macro):
/%%Page:^Mwwyaw/pdfxs^Mo280 17 m^M/N6514 14 Tf^M()^M[10.1078 7 10.892
6.21579 ] pdfxs^[kPx
which reads as:
280 17 m
()
[10.1078 7 10.892 6.21579 ] pdfxs
NOTE: ^M is an enter.
After that I tested that the macro worked for the next page and it did (@q calls the 'q' macro), I let vim work:
600@q
Just write:
psnup -2 book.ps double.ps
Luis Alfonso Vega García
Ingeniero en Sistemas Computacionales
webpage: http://mx.geocities.com/elvegamx/
use jdirdiff: http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=jdirdiff
LPI000053380 -- Linux User: 326423 at http://counter.li.org/
gpg-key:
http://vegacom.blogspot.com/2004/09/vegacomgmailcom-gpg-public-key.html
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