So.

For reasons that have literally nothing whatsoever with my wanting to make booklets, I need to make booklets.

I have a fairly standard issue 8.5x11" double side printing laser printer with a quarter inch all sides page padding, and a guillotine bar cutter. I would like to produce three cutouts, 8"x3.5", therefrom (horizontal strips, no vertical gap inbetween.) These should be repetitions of the same content, over and over.

I could, of course, just repeat each page's content three times. Maybe make a really gross entity, or something. Maybe do it in javerscrupt.

But is there a "proper" way to get Prince to automatically stamp the viewport three times per page?

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

That actually sounds like an imposition task, where you would specify a page size of 8x3.5" in Prince and then request 3-up printing from the printer (three pages printed per impression).

Prince doesn't do imposition, but it's something that can be done by third party tools applied to any PDF, so I would suggest starting there -- or just triplicate the page content

Can you recommend an imposer? I'm merely an imposter

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

Edited 20 May 2025 by StoneCypher

actually now i'm kind of wondering whether content: flow is an imposer implementer

do you hear them howling, in the distance? that's because i'm about to do this the wrongest way

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

Edited 20 May 2025 by StoneCypher

Maybe make side margins the same width as the page body?

that is exactly what i did

listen. ***listen***. montax imposer is more expensive than your product.

that's nonsense.

it seems almost certain that your mercury setup could do this in like eight lines of not-prolog.

i do not understand why you aren't eating their lunch

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

I think it would take a lot more work than that! Many features may look simple but turn out to depend on innumerable complexities once you actually get into the details.

I think if we started with a simple 2-up imposition feature we would immediately find that we need a plethora of new options to control ordering and alignment and rotation and outer page size vs. inner page size etc. that would require careful design to avoid creating a monster.

i am jedi mind tricking into the form as hard as i can right now

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

My particular publishing situation also has a use case for native two-up imposition, for what it's worth: we have some customers who want their ebook PDFs in "spreads" format, but also want them tagged, and every third-party imposer I'm aware of either badly mangles or entirely removes the document's tag structure.

Edited 12 Jun 2025 by David J Prokopetz

Thanks, it's helpful to have descriptions of use cases like this!