Gentoo : PDF Booklet printing : PDF XCHANGE VIEWER 2.5

[lanthruster]

Just a brief review of the current (26.11.2022) situation with PDF booklet printing in Gentoo.

As Adobe dropped support for it's Reader for Linux the current libraries are no longer compatible with the legacy native Acroread 9.5.5.
You won't be able to launch it as it would segfault, I played a lot with it and found no way to make it work with the current libraries. It will end up with glibc segfaults, and just not usable any longer.

All the rest tools like Boomaga or Windows Acrobat Reader are unstable or difficult to use, various native linux tools like qpf, Okular, Libre Office, Chromium, GIMP, MuPDF, Firefox, etc - do not unfortunately support booklet printing for unimaginable reasons. Basically no way to easy print PDF in booklets in Linux at the moment. Acrobat reader for Windows is fantastically unstable in Wine and it needs tweaking to support printing if it launches. You better avoid it. It's slow and causes various problems with Wine server itself (even with overrides).

So the situation is quite desperate. And you will save a lot of time knowing that currently the only way to support PDF Booklet printing with similar to native Acrobat is the free windows tool called PDF XCHANGE VIEWER 2.5 (2018)

Please take a note that exactly 2.5 required, this branch support was dropped but you can still download it from mirrors. Its successor called PDF Editor won't work in Wine and generally unstable no way moving there but if you download and setup 2.5 version in WINE you will be fine and satisfied as it's free, fast, stable, supports booklet printing (same way as native Acroread) and runs in Wine pretty well. No dll overrides required just get it launch it and you have the damn booklet printing back.

[kite14]

Tools like pdfjam (app-text/pdfjam), pdfbook2 (part of app-text/texlive-core) and pdftk (app-text/pdftk) can make booklets from a regular PDF A4-sized input file.

- https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/pdfbook2.1.html
- https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2018/06/13/pdf-booklet-y-stuff-using-pdfjam-and-pdftk/

Those are all CLI-only tools, but you can integrate them in you file manager as "Service Menus". If you use KDE, you can check this out: https://www.egregorion.net/ This will install few scripts as "Service Menu" and let you have some handy operation on PDF files directly in Dolphin file manager. Those scripts are not updated and need to be adjusted since some programs are no longer available in Gentoo (for example, "nup" must be replaced with "pdfjam" and "pdfbook" with "pdfbook2").

[lanthruster]