Printing Two Double-Sided Copies of an A5 Document on A4 Paper

Question

I'm using LaTeX to write a quiz for the calculus class that I'm teaching, and I'm trying to save paper by using both sides of half a sheet of A4 paper (i.e., an A5 sheet) instead of one side of an A4 sheet. I'd like to print two double-sided copies of the quiz on a single sheet of A4 paper - i.e., the front side of the A4 sheet contains two copies of page 1, and the back side contains two copies of page 2. Is there a simple way to do this in LaTeX?

@LoopSpace Will you also offer the tikzmark library to Tikz developers? — AndréC, Mar 09 '19 at 08:14
@AndréC My feeling is that tikzmark (which is already on ctan) and pgfmorepages have different relationships to the core pgf code. Tikzmark builds something extra, but pgfmorepages replaces (and extends) something existing. If pgf doesn't want it, I'll happily upload it to ctan. — Andrew Stacey, Mar 09 '19 at 09:46

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 09 '19 at 07:04

6

This may be achieved by using pgfpages package that provides \pgfpageuselayout command to be put in the preambule of the document.

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,landscape]

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-5]
\end{document}

edited Mar 09 '19 at 07:04

answered Sep 24 '18 at 08:54

Hafid Boukhoulda

8,563

Andrew Stacey · Answer 2 · 2019-05-09T18:52:52.110

5

I've written an extension of pgfpages imaginatively called pgfmorepages (CTAN and github) which can handle repeating pages. The following code has two pages and each is repeated. Printing them out will give you two A5 double-sided copies.

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
%\url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/452197/86}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfmorepages}
\pgfmorepagesloadextralayouts

\pgfpagesuselayout{repeated 2-up}[a4paper]

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-5]
\end{document}

The resulting pages look like this:

If downloading from github, you need both pgfmorepages.sty and pgfmorepageslayouts.code.tex.

edited May 09 '19 at 18:52

answered Mar 08 '19 at 23:11

Andrew Stacey

153,724
43
389
751

1

Oh! I'd use the repeated layout. Will you put this on CTAN? – David Purton Mar 09 '19 at 06:13
2

@DavidPurton I've just been bug-fixing with a view to making it more readily available (it is downloadable from github) but thought I should offer it to the pgf maintainers first. – Andrew Stacey Mar 09 '19 at 07:57
@DavidPurton It's now on CTAN. – Andrew Stacey May 09 '19 at 18:53

Printing Two Double-Sided Copies of an A5 Document on A4 Paper

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