[Linux-disciples] Producing 4-up

[Adam Rosi-Kessel]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 03:39:33PM -0400, Dylan Thurston wrote:
> (Adam sent this to me, but it's probably more appropriate here.)

Agreed...

> On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 01:25:30PM -0400, Adam Rosi-Kessel wrote:
> > By the way, are you with Ken right now? And/or do you have any expertise
> > in manipulating ps?  I want to do something really simple, make a 4 up
> > from an OpenOffice document, but all of the PS I generate seems to be
> > un-manipulable.  OO makes PDF, I use pdf2ps, but the I can't, e.g.,
> > psmerge two such files.
> Why do you need psmerge?  In practice, psmerge works pretty poorly and
> only works on very special postscript.  It's better to do merging
> earlier; either with the OO or with the PDF.  'pdftk' will merge the
> PDF files.
> I've never encountered trouble with psnup, OTOH.
> Also, have you tried producing the PS directly from OO?

The problem seems to be that none of the psutils deal very well with OO's
PDF output or its print-to-ps output. I'm not really sure why.

Let's say I have one page and I want to make it four-up. Here's what I
tried:

pdf2ps page1.pdf
cp page1{,2}.ps
cp page1{,3}.ps
cp page1{,4}.ps
psmerge -ofull.ps page*ps
psnup -4 full.ps > full4.ps

This fails as the psmerge--the resultant file is only 547 bytes. No error
reported.

I tried combining PDFs directly with pdftk just now--I wasn't aware of
that tool before--but I get "Input errors, so no output created."

I've also tried running fixps on the postscript files, but it doesn't
make any difference.

It's like I've got all these great tools for manipulating ps any which
way, but none of them actually work for me. This may be because of
defective OO PDF generation, although I don't have trouble with OO pdfs
otherwise... so I'm just trying to figure out what to do.
-- 
Adam Rosi-Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org
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