As a follow-up, just in case someone will search the archive for a similar problem, this is my “solution”, regardless of the question if the imposition scheme is really suitable for binding or not. It's quite an hack, but it seems to work and is way simpler for a profane like me to create a custom imposition schema (code below). I dropped the ConTeXt-based solution with layers because of the amount of work required to bootstrap it. As a side note, I stumbled in a psutils bug (no surprise, the version on the CTAN is *12* years old), where the %%BoundingBox and %%DocumentMedia header where inserted correctly, but the original preserved, leading to viewer (and even printer?) to believe the PS had still the old dimensions (so I removed them with sed before passing it to pstops). Cheers #!/bin/bash set -e set -o pipefail # avoid to use polluted path, or the debug will be impossible export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin # the input document should have exactly the width set to half of # this, and the height set to half too, which means 16cmx22cm. Paper # is 32cm x 44cm width=907 height=1247 # usual check if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then echo "$1 is not a file, exiting" exit fi # naming convention input=$1 output=${input%%.pdf}-imposed.pdf # the scheme: U means rotated 180°, the parens indicate the shifting # after the rotation. We use the w and h flag to avoid math :-) # pages are numbered from 0. p1="15(0,0)+0(0.5w,0)+12U(0.5w,1h)+3U(1w,1h)" p2="1(0,0)+14(0.5w,0)+2U(0.5w,1h)+13U(1w,1h)" p3="11(0,0)+4(0.5w,0)+8U(0.5w,1h)+7U(1w,1h)" p4="5(0,0)+10(0.5w,0)+6U(0.5w,1h)+9U(1w,1h)" # the sed string is needed to avoid a broken DSC pdftops -level3 "$input" - | \ sed -e '/^%%BoundingBox:/d' -e '/^%%DocumentMedia:/d' | \ pstops -b -w$width -h$height \ "16:$p1,$p2,$p3,$p4" | \ ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \ -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=$width -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=$height \ - "$output" pdfinfo "$output" pdffonts "$output" echo "$input => $output" exit 0 -- Marco