Printing Books in Linux

written on Thursday, March 27, 2014

One day I wanted to print an old book, which I was not able to buy. As the result of this task, I've got a set of commands, which might be useful for the others.

First step for me was to find a better placement on a page for the text, because I was going to use a plastic combs for holding pages together. Using this manual, I was able to produce a suitable result with pstops utility, which turned out to be a very powerful tool:

$ pstops '1:0@0.9(0,1.4cm)' input.ps | pstops '2:0@1(0,0),1@1(0,2cm)' \
 | psselect -p2-545 | psbook | psnup -pa4 -b0.2cm -d1 -2 >output.ps

The next challenge was to figure out the correct printing command, because printer kept re-scaling the image, and trying to fit image with borders within the other borders. The result of this fight is the following lp invocation:

$ lp -d 966-R020-CANON -o landscape -o sides=two-sided-short-edge \
  -o media=A4 -o PageSize=A4 -o fitplot -o media=iso_a4_210x297mm

The most important is a -o fitplot option, which tells printer not to scale down the image and print it as is. For your case the printing command can be a bit different.

Then, in order not to print one big file, I've splitted it in 20-pages ps files with the help of the script prepare_batches.sh:

  #!/bin/bash

  i=1
  step=20
  upper_limit=$1

  while [[ $i -lt $upper_limit ]]
  do
    if [[ $(($i+$step)) -gt $upper_limit ]]; then
      echo "${i}-${upper_limit}"
    else
      echo "${i}-$(($i+$step-1))"
    fi

    i=$(($i+$step))
  done

Here is the execution:

  $ ~/prepare_batches.sh 252
  1-20
  21-40
  41-60
  61-80
  81-100
  101-120
  121-140
  141-160
  161-180
  181-200
  201-220
  221-240
  241-252

Final splitting has been done the following way:

$ k=1; for i in $(~/prepare_batches.sh 252)
do
  psselect -p${i} input.ps output${k}.ps
  k=$(($k+1))
done

That's it. Now you have all the tools to become a guru of a book printing in Linux.

Useful Links

Categories: linux