Booklet printing à la PocketMod

aomapes2 · Newbie Joined: 08 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

Hello there,

I have been using little 8 pages pocket-size booklets that you do by folding and partially cutting a sheet of paper.

This format has been widely spread around about a year ago by PocketMod here you can have a quick glance at it:

I am not really into the paper-PDA thing, nevertheless the format by itself suits me very well to carry around some important data that I need for my work.

As you can see in this image, you have to print 8 pages of your document on the same side of a single sheet, but not only that, these pages have to be tilted and printed in a particular manner in order to fit the requirement of this folded booklet format.

PocketMod website offers a PDFtoPocketMod converter, but unfortunately this does not work on my linux distribution (not even throught Wine).

Following exemple found here and there I made myself a script using the pstops library.

geoff80fg · OOo Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2006 Posts: 421 Location: UK

This would be very simple to achieve if a frame could be rotated but, alas, this does not seem possible in Writer. We are only allowed to print vertically in one direction and trying to use a Draw object with rotated text is fraught with difficulties.

I have given up trying to do such things in Writer and can only hope that we will eventually be able to rotate frames (along with their content) - it is so useful to create "quick and easy" folded greetings cards.

Geoff

Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 1:05 am Post subject:

Without doubt, trying to do such tasks in OpenOffice is a waste of time. Probably one can do it if one tries hard enough, but it is much easier in a DTP program. Try Serif Page Plus SE, which is free and can do this kind of task very easily by rotating text frames. If you need PDF output, upgrade to PagePlus 9 for £10.

No doubt Scribus can do this quite easily too, but I have never used it.
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Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 1:15 am Post subject:

I just tested it to see how easy it was in Page Plus SE. I set up a landscape A4 page with 2 rows and 4 columns, drew the frames, imported the text, manually flowed the text in the right order, then rotated the top frames. The screen shot has been rotated to fit the forum thread better.

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aomapes2 · Newbie Joined: 08 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

Well, thank you for your fast answer.
But I think I will be sticking to my script since my HD space is precious and I wouldn't like to install any new soft for the moment.
I was hoping to find an OOo solution to this problem...
Do you think there could be a way to add a modify-as-you-need-the-multiple-pages-in-one-layout-printing-option in a future release of OOo ?

Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 12:31 pm Post subject:

You can be sure that if I knew of a workable Oo solution I would tell you. Don't even think about waiting for such a feature to be added to Oo.

If experienced users tell you it is difficult, then it is. I won't even bother telling you how it might be done, but check out my A6 booklet templates to see some examples of using frames in Oo. As already said, there is no way to rotate frames in Oo though you can rotate paragraphs, from Format, Character, Position.

Do let us know how you get on.
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magnoliasouth · General User Joined: 03 Jan 2007 Posts: 14

Not a solution, granted, but I did find an very interesting template (via Word, but OO handles it in more than a lovely way) so there are people out there who don't think of it as a waste of time, experienced users or not.

http://eyesofcalvin.wordpress.com/2006/07/06/8/

Just thought I'd pass this along because I was looking for something similar.