Hi Bruce,

I have a book to be perfect bound[1] and I'm trying to work out what imposition to use.

The printer would like 4 A5 pages laid out on A3 e.g.

+---+---+ | | | | a | b | | | | +---+---+ | | | | c | d | | | | +---+---+

so that he can cut the paper and simply stack a, b, c, & d on top of each other and then put them in the binding machine[2].

If the book is 40 pages long, say, then stack 'a' has page 1 on the top, page 2 on the reverse, then the next sheet has page 3 and 4, and so on down to the last sheet which has page 9 on the front and page 10 on the back. Stack 'b' would have page 11 on the front, 12 on the back and so on, so that each stack has a quarter of the book.

Is this something LMTX can do and if so what combination of \setuplayout and \setuppaper do I need to use? If they can be printed in reverse order then great but I assume the printer can do that fairly easily.

I don't think that there's any way to do this from within a document run, so I think that you'll need to use an external program.

If not, is there a recommended external program that can do it?

But, you can use ConTeXt as the external program here. Save as "imposition.cld": local filename = document.getargument("filename") local pdf = lpdf.epdf.image.open(filename) local pages = pdf.nofpages local max = math.ceil(pages / 4) context.setuppapersize({ "A5" }, { "A3" }) context.setuppaper { nx = 2, ny = 2 } context.setuparranging { "XY" } local function insert_page(n) context.startpagemakeup() context.filterpages({ filename }, { n }) context.stoppagemakeup() end context.starttext() for i = 1, max do if i % 2 == 1 then insert_page(i + 0 * max) insert_page(i + 1 * max) insert_page(i + 2 * max) insert_page(i + 3 * max) else insert_page(i + 1 * max) insert_page(i + 0 * max) insert_page(i + 3 * max) insert_page(i + 2 * max) end end context.stoptext() Then run: context imposition.cld --filename=document.pdf where "document.pdf" is replaced by your document name. I'm not sure if I got your desired output quite right here, but hopefully you can easily modify the script if something isn't quite right. Thanks, -- Max

Am 09.10.22 um 02:29 schrieb Bruce Horrocks via ntg-context:

I have a book to be perfect bound[1] and I'm trying to work out what imposition to use.

The printer would like 4 A5 pages laid out on A3 e.g.

+---+---+ | | | | a | b | | | | +---+---+ | | | | c | d | | | | +---+---+

so that he can cut the paper and simply stack a, b, c, & d on top of each other and then put them in the binding machine[2].

If the book is 40 pages long, say, then stack 'a' has page 1 on the top, page 2 on the reverse, then the next sheet has page 3 and 4, and so on down to the last sheet which has page 9 on the front and page 10 on the back. Stack 'b' would have page 11 on the front, 12 on the back and so on, so that each stack has a quarter of the book.

Is this something LMTX can do and if so what combination of \setuplayout and \setuppaper do I need to use? If they can be printed in reverse order then great but I assume the printer can do that fairly easily. If not, is there a recommended external program that can do it?

I've tried \setuplayout[4*2] and XY with 2x2 but neither output is what I need.

You meant \setuparranging, didn’t you? https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Imposition has an example on how to create your own scheme. Good luck! Hraban