Add booklet command

[pastor-robert]

Add command "booklet". It reorders and 2-ups the pages to create a booklet. Booklets have a page count that is a multiple of four. If the input file's page count is not a multiple, blank pages, or user-specified pages, are inserted in fixed locations.

[Lucas-C]

Thank you very much for your contribution @pastor-robert 👍

We were already working on a x2pdf --format option that may overlap with your new subcommand: #63

A PR is in progress: #65
Could you maybe have a look at it? Wouldn't it cover a similar usage?

[pastor-robert]

We were already working on a x2pdf --format option that may overlap with your new subcommand: #63

Thanks! I was very eager to get started, so I did not start a discussion or survey existing work. Mea culpa.

However, I don't see the overlap between these two. #63 is about specifying the output paper size of the x2pdf command. #77 produces an output file which, when printed and folded appropriately, creates a booklet. Notably, this feature does not include any resizing.

This PR reorders pages into "signature order" or "book order". Assuming an 8-page input.pdf, the following command sequences are equivalent.

pdfly booklet input.pdf output.pdf

pdfly cat -o tmp.pdf input.pdf 7 0 1 6 5 2 3 4 
pdfly 2-up -tmp.pdf output.pdf

If you are seeing an overlap that I'm missing, can you help me understand what that is?

[Lucas-C]

If you are seeing an overlap that I'm missing, can you help me understand what that is?

You are right, there is no overlap with this feature 😅
I mixed things up, I wanted to refer to issue #64 & PR #67

So the question is: we could have x2pdf --layout 2x2 $imgs_or_pdfs to produce the ordering required to make a booklet,
but would a dedicated booklet subcommand be better for this?

Also, it seems that the booklet subcommand would extract pages from a single existing PDF, which would make it different from x2pdf behaviour...

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think that a dedicated booklet subcommand makes sense.

What do you think about it @pastor-robert? 🙂

[pastor-robert]

Thanks @Lucas-C . I went through about the same logic that you did. After I posted that note, I found #64 / #67. I thought about commands like x2pdf --layout book-order input.pdf or 2-up --book-order input.pdf, but neither seemed to fit.

My intuition is that end-users would be more confused by adding book-order printing to either of those features than they would be by having the feature stand alone.

My recommendation is to make booklet stand apart from either x2pdf or 2-up.

Also, it seems that the booklet subcommand would extract pages from a single existing PDF, which would make it different from x2pdf behaviour...

I thought about having booklet subcommand take a set of PDF files & page ranges a la cat. I think that may be a good idea, but not for this initial version.

[Lucas-C]

Alright, you convinced me @pastor-robert 🙂

Merged!

Thank you very much for this excellent addition 👍

[Lucas-C]

This has been released in version 0.4.0: https://pypi.org/project/pdfly/#history