In comp.periphs.printers Eli the Bearded wrote:
In c.l.postscript and c.p.printers, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
The output format was A5 pages, to be arranged into two
single-sided A4 print jobs performed in sequence to produce
double-sided A4 pages that were cut in half to produce the
double-sided A5 pages ready for perfect binding. I did all the
printing and binding myself, so this was designed to suit my own
production process.

Do you have a guillotine paper cutter, or were you using something else?
Having once used a proper guillotine (clamps paper, then cuts straight
down) I've become very not a fan of the non-clamp swing arm style.

This is the one that I've got (or close enough):
https://www.comemachines.com/collect...-cutting-width

It has a clamp, and I'd say you definately need it. The main
problem with it is that the "blade safety knob" keeps coming off,
but otherwise it works pretty well.

Faced with doing something like that myself, I'd probably be more
inclined to just buy pre-cut reams in the smaller size and print on
those in regular duplex. It would also make the imposition easier.
Although I usually use US Letter, my printer supports down to A6
from the paper tray and I know how to buy "exotic" sizes.

Well to get a nice result where you can flick through pages with
your thumb, you need to trim the three faces of the book, or at
least the long one. Plus to cut the cover of paperback books down
to exactly the same size as the pages. The guillotine is needed
for that anyway, and then printing time is improved if you print
on A4.

But actually I did try with A5 and found that, in spite of any
claims about support for such paper sizes, it guaranteed a paper
jam with my printer, so I didn't have much choice anyway.

If you need the guillotine anyway, as I suggest, it's cheaper to
buy A4 (or I guess letter in your part of the world) and cut it in
half yourself even if your are running the smaller size through
your printer.

Generation of the A5 document was done in Libre Office using a
Libre Office Basic script, which was a choice I soon regretted
because a lot of things didn't seem to work properly. That produced
the A5 document in Postscript, which I reformatted into the two A4
Postscript print jobs using psutils.

Creating of some intermediate format via scripting has been suggested to
me, but no one has pointed me to an easy way to do that. I don't want to
try my hand a *roff template; I haven't done anything but man pages in
20+ years. I don't know Tex/Latex well enough to create my own
templates. And I looked briefly at Sile[*] which tries to modernize
layout and takes Knuth's basic line breaking / filling system and using
that for both lines and larger blocks: the better to avoid orphaned
words or lines. Sile gave me a lot of compile trouble on my (then) older
Ubuntu and I never really went back.

Well yes I looked into Latex and the like as well, but I can't
remember the actual path of reasoning that lead me to choose Libre
Office instead. Probably I wasn't finding clear examples of using
those tools to do the sort of thing I wanted, and just generating a
Libre Office Writer document by running a LO Basic script in a
template document seemed easier, but I don't think it was in the
end.

I only ever attempted novels in plain text as input, never any
images.

Many novels have images, too. I selected the (commercially printed)
version of _Moby Dick_ I'm reading now because of the Rockwell Kent
illustrations. Those are not in public domain yet, being from 1930.

I was thinking of books like _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ as probably good
to illustrate. There are a lot of now public domain pictures for that
book, and not so many print versions with those pictures. When I read
it, the copy had no illustrations. The illustrations are part of what
gave it its naughty reputation. The text never really goes further than
"she surrendered all to me" style details.

I think getting the scaling and orientation right for each image
would probably have to be a manual process. Then again, I only had
TXT or HTML to choose between for a lot of the books I wanted to
do. I don't know if the ebook formats offer metadata about
real-world dimensions and orientation on a page. Actually I've
never even used an ebook format, even for the intended use.

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