It has been a while since the angel talked with me, however, I haven’t ended up with a clean solution for getting OpenOffice.org Writer to flip the page when printing out. Currently, one has to do the following steps:
- Export to PDF the appropriate pages
- Use pdfjam tools (more specifically, pdfnup) to collate the 2 pages into a single page
- Use a tool like GIMP to make an image of that PDF
- Flip the image
Isn’t it possible to use the print dialog from the software to handle the above as a seamless step ?
There are actually two steps needed to solve the problem, rearranging and incorporation into OOo
Rearranging is actually called “imposition”. There are several tools able to do this, e.g. pdftk, pdflatex, podofo …
I am using pdflatex most of the time, because it allows me to put a header and footer on the page, as well as page numbers and generate a table of contents, but the other tools might be suited better for your task.
Get it to work with OOo either means exporting to pdf and using the tool, then printout (which is not the worst idea, because you may want to check the contents before doing the impositioning anyways), or create a new “printer” with “spadmin” (StarOffice Printer Admin? – it is locate somewhere in lib, so you have to start it with the full path). Use “Distiller” for the printer type, create a script which does everything you want, and put this script as the “distilling” command.
What does “flip” mean? I thought rotate at first, but it could mean mirror, flip horizontally/vertically or so.
Does the –turn option of pdfnup help? Or any other, reading the man page? At first I thought about the pdf90 tool for doing rotations, but as noted, that might not be what you meant.
pdflatex solves the problem fine for me.