Hi, first question, probably a stupid one but I couldn't find it anywhere.

Is it possible to have an online webtext from say a brochure, and transform it into a pdf with the pages in imposition - order? Example: I have webcontent and would like to fit it into an 8-page brochure on paper. That brochure consists 2 A4's (landscape), folded in half to form an 8-page A5 brochure. This means I need to print the text of page one on the right half of an A4, and the text of page 8 on the left side of that same A4. And so on: page 7 - 2, 6 -3 etc.
Can I use CSS and Prince to make such an impositioned pdf out of webcontent?

Thanks in advance!

Prince does not support this kind of page rearrangement automatically, so it is not yet possible to take an arbitrary document and reorder the pages in this manner.

It is possible to do it manually, if your brochure content is naturally split into distinct pages even in the input markup, eg.

<div id="page1">...</div>
<div id="page2">...</div>

Then you would just need to rearrange the pages. However for a document with content that can span multiple pages Prince can't rearrange it for you. It does sound like a good feature to add though!

Thanks … what a quick reply!

I guess we could start organising pages ourselves, at least it's good to know that we can handle it that way.

As for a feature to handle this automatically: this would make a great argument to start using Prince in print-on-demand environments! Right now I do have a question lingering form a large hospital (client of ours) that has trouble managing several hundreds of infromation brochures both on- and offline. They'd like to start to use their website as primary and only source of information, but printing their brochures in their information centers would be pretty vital as well … and all of those are impositioned. Hint, hint

Actually, another option that I forgot to mention would be to use Prince to produce a PDF with the pages in logical order: 1, 2, 3... and then use a PDF processing tool to rearrange the pages before/while printing the PDF. This would be similar to n-up printing, in which the input PDF can be rearranged by the printer driver, for example to place two logical pages on each physical sheet of paper.

I haven't used such a PDF tool myself though; if anyone has don't hesitate to chime in with an opinion!

I thought about something like that myself … sometimes printerdrivers allow for such a procedure, but I do not like to rely on that. I'd much rather find a way to know for certain it works. So if any-one does know a pdf-page-sorting tool, that'd be great!