This is called impositioning; it's a common function for printers to minimize paper use dating back hundreds of years.
There are plenty of ways to imposition n-up pages via itext; just look them up. Or use a transform for every other page in your program. Or write a two half-size PDF's and place them on a big PDF. Or use one of the tools written impositioning multiple pages to a PDF. Or use your printer driver to do this. As for counting them during production add a counter to the loop that's producing them. I don't know about others but I hesitated and did a week of testing before thinking about wasting Bruno's time when I found a bug in the tab-chunk mechanism. I verified the bug (tab chunks behave erratically with justified text) with many fonts, many tab chunk sizes, many text samples, with and without characters. Bruno decided not to fix the because the complexity of the fix outweighed the benefit to most, and there are workarounds, a decision I understand and respect. But -- and this is what I'm getting at -- I uploaded a clean, clear, concise code sample and a PDF illustrating the bug and spent a lot of time verifying it wasn't my system and could be reproduced. I'm pointing this out not to whine about my tabbing but (there are plenty of workarounds; submitted it mainly to bring to his attention) but to try to show the level of diligence people should go through before submitting questions. Please try to do the work on your own and leave the itext authors to write itext. I'm not an itext author but have worked with programatically generated PDF for years and don't mind answering questions to save their time. Even then I still would prefer if people at least try before submitting questions. Michael. On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 5:19 PM, Harlan Messinger <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm interested in generating a PDF containing a set of cards half of > U.S. standard letter size. For some reason, my HP printer prints very > slowly when I print to paper of any size other than letter, so what I'd > like to do is print two cards on each full letter-size card stock in > landscape orientation, so that I can then slice the pile of cards in > half. After I'm done, the cards should be in a particular order, and it > will be easiest if I can do it as follows: > > 1. Generate the cards as virtual pages, without adding them to the > document, so that when I've finished that I can see how many I have. > > 2. If I have N cards (where N is an even number; if N is odd, then I'll > just add a blank card on the end), I want to write card1 to the left > side of the first full-size page of the PDF and card (N/2 + 1) to the > right side, card 2 and card (N/2 + 2) to the second page, and so on, so > that card (N/2) and card N are both on the final sheet. > > I tried to find a suitable generic container element for this purpose > but I was unsuccessful. Is there a solution? > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval > Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs > proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. > See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev > _______________________________________________ > iText-questions mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions > > Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ > Check the site with examples before you ask questions: > http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ > You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/ > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
