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I occasionally need to make a little program or bulletin of the sort that is a single page that is folded in half to make a little book with a front, back, and two inside pages. I've been able to do it a couple of ways, both a little hacky, but the problem is that the resulting .pdf is hard for some people to print. (You must print landscape, two-sided, tumbling on the short edge.)

I'd like to rotate the contents of the back side so that it can be printed with tumble on the long edge (the usual case). The leaflet class does exactly what I want in this regard, but makes six little pages on a sheet to be folded twice instead of four pages on a sheet to be folded once.

I thought about trying to make a modified version of leaflet, but Tex code at that level is beyond me. It just looks like line noise. I came up with the following. It works, but is a bit hacky (the \stretch is needed to prevent content shifting off a rotated page). And with all the real content in the preamble, all warning messages like "overfull hbox" have the line number of just one of two lines in the actual document.

Is there a better way?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}% for \rotatebox
\usepackage[landscape,top=0.5in,left=0.5in]{geometry}
\pagestyle{empty}

\newenvironment{mypage}
  {\begin{minipage}[c][7in]{4.5in}}
  {\vspace{\stretch{0.001}}
   \end{minipage}}

\newcommand\frontpage{
  \begin{mypage}
    Front Page (content ...)
  \end{mypage}}

\newcommand\backpage{
  \begin{mypage}
    Back Page (content ...)
  \end{mypage}}

\newcommand\insideLpage{
  \begin{mypage}
    Inside-Left Page (content ...)
  \end{mypage}}

\newcommand\insideRpage{
  \begin{mypage}
    Inside-Right (content ...)
  \end{mypage}}

\begin{document}
\noindent\insideLpage{}\hspace{1in}\insideRpage{}

\noindent\rotatebox[origin=c]{180}{\backpage{}\hspace{1in}\frontpage{}}
\end{document}
dedded
  • 2,236
  • Perhaps the booklet package is of use here, with geometry in order to change the layout –  Aug 29 '17 at 10:41
  • Have you considered the information on this question? Also here you can find templates and/or in this repository. – Cragfelt Aug 29 '17 at 10:44
  • I got to the point where I can get two logical pages up on one physical page with the booklet package, but can't get the second physical page to be upside-down (for long-side duplex printing). It also seems like the content of alternate logical pages is right-justified. – dedded Aug 29 '17 at 12:12
  • @ChristianHupfer Good luck with that. The packages are incompatible. There is a workaround which used to work, but hasn't for ages. – cfr Aug 29 '17 at 12:29
  • The most straightforward way is a two-file solution. Prepare one document with geometry A5 or whatever you need as usual. Then use a second wrapper with pdfpages and geometry set to A4 or whatever you need, which just includes the first document. pdfpages has options for setting things up as booklets etc. – cfr Aug 29 '17 at 12:31
  • See my answer https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/154777/a5-booklet-printing-title-page-and-toc-are-missing/154810#154810. The first option no longer works for me. I now use the second exclusively. This involves two files, but it is absolutely unproblematic (so far, anyway). pdfpages just works. – cfr Aug 29 '17 at 12:34

1 Answers1

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First, make a document with four A5 pages.

\documentclass[a5paper,twoside]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{geometry}
\begin{document}
Front cover.
\clearpage
Inside left.
\clearpage
Inside right.
\clearpage
Back cover.
\end{document}

Let's say the resulting PDF is a5pages.pdf.

Now make a wrapper to create the booklet.

\documentclass[a4paper,twoside]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
  \includepdf[pages=-,nup=1x2,landscape,signature=4]{a5pages}
\end{document}

booklet (needs more content)

cfr
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