Manipulating print documents

overbored · 12-01-2006, 10:06 PM

is there a way to do advanced print manipulation (eg concatenating, n-up, selecting pages, scaling, etc.) that's better than mucking around with postscript files or crossing fingers over printer drivers?

over many years/boxen/trials, i've found that PS manipulation tools like psutils almost never work, or the output is poor. i ultimately fall back to windows where i end up using freeware or MS Document Imaging.

auxsvr · 12-03-2006, 03:33 PM

If you are using KDE, kprinter does all you want although some settings aren't well implemented. Of course KDE applications implement this seamlessly; for other programs you need to edit the print preferences and replace any occurrences of lp or lpr with kprinter. I have printed thousands of two side pages with my printer, even though it doesn't have a duplexer.

overbored · 12-03-2006, 03:57 PM

Thanks; per another suggestion, I actually ended up using pdf tools for now, since they seem to work (at least so far) more consistently than their ps counterparts. In particular, there's pdfjam and pdftk.

I wonder what formats kprinter and gtklp use internally.

Now all Linux needs is a nice GUI viewer over these tools so that you can visually do all the operations and see the outcome, especially page selection.