jan.bio

Printing books with psutils

If you have a duplex-printer, psbook from psutils might help you to save paper by printing books in A5 format. But I never can remember the command to rotate, scale and print a large postscript file. The problem is, that some laser printers are rotating every second page by 180 degrees. The answer is (quite) easy, so here we go:

psbook -q test.ps | psnup -2 | pstops '2:0,1U(1w,1h)' | lpr

If test.ps is a A4 file, psbook will first reorder the pages, psnup will put two pages on one and pstops will rotate every other page by 180 degrees. You will get a nice A5 book.