Bookprinting Part 2: Signatures

[!NOTE]

Part 1 should be about creating book pages with LaTeX

Now I have individual PDF pages that are loosely connected. I could probably create a ring binder with them, but I don’t have the equipment to do so and would prefer a more traditional format. To do this, I need to create what are known as signatures. This involves printing several pages of a book onto a single sheet of paper in such a way that they can be folded to form a book. The individual folded pages can then be assembled into packages:

The sum of the packages then results in what is essentially the raw book, before the actual assembly.

The pdfbook2 package, which is included with texlive-extra-utils, can be used for this purpose. I would like to create a 16-page ligature here, i.e., 16 pages are always combined into one such paper package. My original file with the single pdf pages is document.pdf and I also tell about papersize and to avoid cropping pages.

pdfbook2 document.pdf --signature=16 --no-crop --paper=a4paper

Printing double-sided without a duplex function

Select the “Print” tab. Then click on “Print all pages.” Now select “Print odd pages only.” Then click on “Print” to print all odd pages (or the front sides). Make sure that you do not change the “Single-sided printing” selection. Then place the stack of printed pages back into the printer. This time, however, place it upside down so that the backsides are printed. Now select the option “Print even pages only” under “Print all pages.” Click on “Print” again to print all the backsides. You have now printed your entire document double-sided – without a printer with a duplex function!