impose+ (15-Nov-2003)

# impose+

## version 0.2
A set of PostScript utilities
by Dov Grobgeld

Latest version: impose+-0.2.tar.gz

## Description

impose+ is a set of postscript utilities that are mainly front ends to the standard package psutils.

impose may also be used as a print filter, e.g. for automatically printing two-up files from netscape.

The utilities are all written in perl and are released under the GNU public licence as described in the file COPYING. They depend on the installation of the psutils package by Angus J.C. Duggan.

## impose

impose is used for two-up printing of DSC complient postscript. This includes postscript from e.g. netscape, dvips, and openoffice. It makes an effort to remove white space from the printout by probing the original postscript for the bounding box of the printed area. This makes the output much more esthetic than does a simplistic layout of non-cropped original papers.

This is shown in the following example that shows the same pages treated by both psnup (part of psutils) and by impose.

psnup -2 | impose
--- | ---

The left image is the simplistic tiling done by "psnup -2" where the whole page has been tiled. On the right is the postscript output of impose. As can be seen, a postscript file created by impose has more text and less white space on it.

## psbl

psbl is a frontend to impose that takes care of booklet printing. This involves the following steps:

- Splits documents with too many pages into multiple "signatures".
- Rearranges the pages in the correct order within the signature.
- Calls impose on the result.
- Inserts instructions in the postscript to make the printer tumble the output.

The output may then be sent directly to a duplex postscript printer which then produces an esthetic booklet.

Here is an image showing the result of the page arrangement for an 8-page document:

## fixtd

Used to add postscript instructions asking the printer to turn on tumbling and or duplex option.

## bboxx

Calculate the individual and global bounding boxes of a postscript file. This has now been rewritten to use the recent introduced bbox device of ghostscript.

dov@imagic.weizmann.ac.il - 15 Nov 2003