Making booklets

So I was asked to help produce the program/abstract book for the CSPC'07 (Postgrad Colloquium) with LaTeX. I said Yes since here's a legitimate opportunity to get my LaTeX fix. ;-)

The end result was to be an A5-sized booklet, i.e. 2-up pages on an A4 sheet, folded. I tried the LaTeX booklet package, but it wouldn't play nice with the geometry package, not without me twiddling explicitly with the page sizes and margins. Dear, dear./>
Thank goodness for GNU/Linux though, since we can always use psutils for producing booklets, and we want PDF outputs anyway. And so, once the full-sized A4 abstractbook.pdf is done, these commands spring into action:

$ pdftops -paper A4 abstractbook.pdf abstractbook.ps
$ psbook -s40 abstractbook.ps absbook-sig.ps
$ psnup -n2 -pa4 absbook-sig.ps abstractbooklet.ps
$ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 abstractbooklet.ps


where the -s40 parameter to psbook signifies there should be 40 pages in the booklet. The number must be a multiple of 4. It doesn't matter if your full-size doc doesn't have the right number of pages; psbook will add blank pages as necessary, so just round up your actual page number to the next multiple of 4 to pass to psbook.

TA-DAAAAA!!!!




It was a learning experience especially the following points:

• Do not be a smart-aleck and try to reset page numberings when making twoside documents. Let \frontmatter and \bodymatter do the job. Otherwise the odd/even page margins get all messed up.
  
• Use the ltxtable package for longtable + tabularx. But then each longtable (with tabularx column specs) needs to be in its own individual file.
  
• On the whole, LaTeX is relatively easier than
  
  • coaxing printers to co-operate.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • proof-reading.
    
  • ESPECIALLY the proof-reading.