Printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper?

saffsd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 139

Hello everyone! I'm looking for a way to print multiple pages onto a single sheet of paper. What I mean is that i'd like to take, for example, a pdf, and print it such that one sheet of paper contains a grid of 2x2 pages from the document. A bit like a "contact sheet" for photographs.
I can do this in windows through the driver for my printer which provides the feature, however the driver for linux does not. I was wondering if there was some other linux software that could perform this task.
Any help is much appreciated!

fangorn · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 1886

If everything fails, print to file (.ps format) and use psnup to reformat with more than one page per page
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saffsd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 139

I've finally gotten around to trying this out. Psnup does exactly what i need it to do, albeit without the one-click functionality i was hoping for. i'm still trying to figure out printing in linux... I did read around a bit though and it seems that the kde print subsystem may be able to do what I want. Apparently it can be run under gnome, and does a pretty good job(that's what the KDE site claims! http://printing.kde.org/info/#gnome) I'll update if i have any better success. I've already slaughtered a small sized forest in sheets of paper using print methods that failed. in evince I have an option to print "4 to a sheet" that doesn't actually do anything. I read somewhere that this was an upstream bug in a GNOME print lib. KDEPrint's filter approach sounds promising to me. Wish me luck!

Bill Thompson · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Jan 2005 Posts: 139

I start with a postscript file, and use the CUPS command line:

lpr -Plp0 -o page-ranges=1-4 -o page-top=12 -o number-up=4 filename.ps

pages-ranges designates the four pages to print
page-top give you the number of points to offset from the top (72 point to the inch)
number-up gives you the number of pages to print on each sheet.

This way you get eight pages for each sheet of paper. I did this with the gentoo installation guide (ninety pages or so) on legal size paper, and it reduced the file to about 24 sheets of paper with room for notes as I went through the installation process.

Variations: two pages per sheet-- just changes page-ranges to 2 and number-up to 2.

saffsd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 139

Anybody interested in doing this may want to look up kprinter and gtklp. Both act as a kind of printing front-end. It's not nicely integrated, but it works. You can either call them on the file to be printed, or from any application that can change its print command. kprinter seems to be the nicer and friendlier of the two. GTKLP seems to have this bad habit of permanently changing settings. That is, say you use it to print 16-to-a-page, all other printing will continue like that until you use GTKLP with different settings. very annoying.