Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!njin!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!grand!day
From: day@grand.UUCP (Dave Yost)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: multiple-upsmanship
Keywords: PostScript
Message-ID: <418@grand.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jun 88 01:29:59 GMT
Organization: Grand Software, Inc., 213-650-1089, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 43

You may remember that a while back, denise@cwi.nl (Denise L. Draper)
posted a program called pshalf, which would print a PostScript file
two-up, that is, in landscape mode side by side at about half size.

I have a burning need for the general case.  I want to print many
pages on a sheet, non-rotated.  I'd like to be able to print them
in pairs, with boxes around them, like this:

	+------+ +------+    +------+ +------+
	|      | |     1|    |2     | |     3|
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	+------+ +------+    +------+ +------+

	+------+ +------+    +------+ +------+
	|4     | |     5|    |6     | |     7|
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	|      | |      |    |      | |      |
	+------+ +------+    +------+ +------+

Layout designers like to look at a book this way.

It would be great if there were the following
parameters that could be tweaked:

ax ay  offset of upper-left of useful part of each page in source ps file
bx by  size of useful part on each page
c      scale factor (multiplied times [bx,by] to make final size of each page)
d      number of pages per row
e      number of pages per column
f      distance in x from odd to even page
g      distance in x from even to odd page
h      distance in y to next row
i      rotate or not
j      leave first page slot blank or not
k      box around each page or not
l      linewidth for k

Has anyone written such a program?  I would gladly pay money for it!

 --dave yost