No, I don't mean "upsetting your daily routine." This term also refers to
the process of re-ordering pages for the the purpose of producing a book.
Specifically, I'm trying to figure out how to produce a music book using
2-sided, 11x17-inch sheets. I would like to start with an ordinary
PMX-generated multipage score. For example suppose there are 8 pages. I
would like to wind up with a postscript file containing 11x17 pages, which I
can then print to 11x17 sheets and duplicate double sided. In the example,
there would be 4 11x17-in pages with left-right pairs of original pages
(8+1), (2+7), (6+3), and (4+5).
I can think of lots of ways to do this, but can't get any of them to work.
1. Buy some very expensive sofware that professional printers use to do
this sort of thing. I confess I haven't tried this one.
2. A. Make the whole score into a PDF. (maybe not necessary)
B. Print each page out to a separate file.
C. Convert each page to .eps (using Ghostview?).
D. Create a separate TeX document of 11x17 pages, each page with
side-by-side \hboxes, each \hbox containing an eps image using \input epsf.
This one worked for some simple images with a manually-converted eps. But
with eps's from a music document all I got were blanks. Maybe there's
something in the Postscript from dvips that prevents Ghostview from
converting it to a proper eps?
3. Make a PDF of the whole project. Re-order pages using Acrobat Exchange.
Use a windows printer driver to print 8.5x11 pages 2-up on 11x17 sheets in
landscape format. I almost got this one to work, but each 8.5x11 image came
out reduced and surrounded by a visible box.
4. Write a program to manipulate the postscript file of the original
document. (look for showpages, etc.) You need a Postscript expert to do
this, and up until last Friday we had one in my office. As a parting
gesture he wrote some FORTRAN for me that did this, but when I tried it the
output file was no good. Besides, this would depend on lots of details in
the Postscript always being the same, which is no sure bet.
5. Do it at the TeX level: Somehow put each original 8.5x11 page of music
into a box, then put the two boxes side-by-side on the 11-by-17 page. I
couldn't get a music page into a box, but this may be the most promising
approach.
I'd appreciate any suggestions, discussion, or examples.
--Don Simons
