Hello there. I deal very often with imposition, useful for zinesters and to create home-made booklets. ConTeXt by itself seems not to manage signatures, i.e., given a text long 200 pages, it should be imposed in smaller booklets of 50 pages each. (Or at least I didn't find anything about it)
At the beginning I was using psbook. But this requires a slow processing (pdf -> ps; psbook ; ps -> pdf). Then I found out that pdfpages does the same thing (and better), and started using that. Now that I switched to ConTeXt, I found that I cannot use pdfpages without a latex installation. So I wrote a script and a module to do the same thing without having to install texlive. It uses MkIV and lua. The code is stored at http://gitorious.org/the-anarchist-library-tools/the-anarchist-library-tools/trees/master/context-imposition A minimal example and (minimal) documentation is provided. The code does basically 2 things: 1) the module, using the \alibraryflushpages commands, fills the output pdf (not imposed) with white pages, until it reach a “good” number, multiple of 4. The signature is calculated at runtime, so you can specify a minimum or a maximum (depends on your staple, if you can trim the paper, and so on). E.g., if the original pages are 128, no problem, the signature is 64 (16 sheets) and you can impose it without problems. But, if the original pages are 129, the optimal signature is 44, so the module will add 3 pages during the PDF compiling. 2) the perl script (which uses only standard perl libraries) creates a temporary context file, gets the number of signatures provided by the module (or passed as option if only the imposition is required against a pdf without tex sources), and does the actual imposing (the algorithm is taken from the psbook sources (the same used by pdfpages), including the pages in the right order. I'm not a real programmer, so it's a piece of spaghetti code. But seems to work. I'm posting this here because it's aimed to people that use the Minimals only, as TeXLive already ships pdfpages, psbook and pdfpages to do the same thing. (Well, the signature is not calculated on the fly by these tools). *If* there are people interested, I'd like to clean it up, improve it, document it a bit better and so on. If not, well, sorry for the noise. Bests -- Marco ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
