[Tex/LaTex] Booklet with a specific page order rule

book-design

Friends, consider the following example (mytext.tex):

\documentclass[a5paper,oneside,12pt]{book}

\begin{document}

{\Huge A}

\newpage

{\Huge B}

\newpage

{\Huge C}

\newpage

{\Huge D}

\newpage

{\Huge E}

\newpage

{\Huge F}

\newpage

{\Huge G}

\newpage

{\Huge H}

\end{document}

I'd like to generate and print a booklet using the pdfpages package as suggested in Booklets in memoir class, so my other code looks like this:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-,booklet,landscape]{mytext.pdf}
\end{document}

It works perfectly, and my booklet is done, with 2 pages from the original document in each page of the new document. This is the result:

   Page 1      |     Page 2       |    Page 3      |     Page 4
  H       A    |    B       G     |   F       C    |    D       E
Page 8  Page 1 |  Page 2  Page 7  | Page 6  Page 3 |  Page 4  Page 5

This is the booklet format. So far, so good.

It happens that I should print it by myself, and this format is not good for my needs. So I'd like if the pdfpages could insert pages in the following format:

   Page 1      |     Page 2       |    Page 3      |     Page 4
  D       A    |    B       C     |   G       D    |    E       F
Page 4  Page 1 |  Page 2  Page 3  | Page 8  Page 5 |  Page 6  Page 7

That way, I could print my document in both sides and cut the pages easily:

Pages

EDIT: Other view (pages 2 and 4 are flipped just to explain their position):

Page

In other words:

Pages

where n is a page number such that n mod 4 = 1.

Could also be [n+2, n], [n+1, n+3] instead of [n+3, n], [n+1, n+2].

As one mentioned, I could manually specify the page order, but it's not feasible for a document with +100 pages.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

I was unaware of the following option in the pdfpages package:

signature Creates booklets by rearranging pages into signatures and setting nup=1x2 or nup=2x1, respectively. This option takes one argument specifying the size of the signature, which should be a multiple of 4.

Right after this paragraph, I could discover that the booklet option uses signature under the hood:

booklet This option is just a shortcut of the signature option, if you choose a signature value so large that all pages fit into one signature. Either true or false (or no value, which is equivalent to true). (Default: booklet=false)

So, the solution:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-,signature=4,landscape]{mytext.pdf}
\end{document}

The output was like I expected. =)

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