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astiam

Member

From: Montevideo

Registered: 2009-04-03

Posts: 5

LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

Hi!

I'm planning to "migrate" all my Scribus templates that I use for a magazine (actually a "fanzine") to LaTeX.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to fit two pages in a single A4 layout, in order to fold the A4 page in half.

I'm checking out the papertex package, but I doesn't seem to provide the solution I'm looking forward.

Does anyone know how to make this folded-in-half-magazine layout with LaTeX?

Thanks in advance!!

kazuo

Member

From: São Paulo/Brazil

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 413

Website

Re: LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

What about booklet or pdfpages packages?

Last edited by kazuo (2010-05-26 23:58:10)

wiley

Member

Registered: 2009-07-04

Posts: 3

Re: LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

Do you mean something else than

\documentclass[landscape,twocolumn]

by "folded-in-half-magazine layout"?

If so I do not undestand what you are looking for. Maybe you could make your explanation a little more detailed? A picture of what you are looking for would be nice, for example a screenshot of your scribus-templates.

Last edited by wiley (2010-05-27 08:00:55)

Berticus

Member

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 731

Re: LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

I think you're looking for something called a 2-up? Or number-up for the general term. I could be wrong, but I think there are ps tools to handle this, like psnup and psbook.

To take care of this in LaTeX, you can use either 2up macros or the booklet package. One caveat of using either one, I don't think it takes creep into account. I think pdfpages would also work.

2up generic: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/generic/2up/
booklet package: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/ … b/booklet/
pdfpages: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/ … /pdfpages/

I don't have any personal experience with these, so you may just have to play around with them. There are also probably a ton of other different ways to go about this as well.

---Edit---
Examples of two different 2-ups:

---Edit---
Cups, search for N-up: http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/options.html
you'll have to play around with the bottom, top, left, right order to get folded vs. cut.

Last edited by Berticus (2010-05-27 15:27:12)

astiam

Member

From: Montevideo

Registered: 2009-04-03

Posts: 5

Re: LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

@kazuo
              I'm goint to give booklet package a try.

@wiley
             I'll be using a two-column layout for the articles, but just for that.

@Berticus
             That's exactly what I was looking for! I didn't know there was a name like 2-up for that.
             The man page of psbook has the answers to many of my questions, so I'm going to use that command in combination with booklet package.

Thank you all for the answers and for your time!!

kazuo

Member

From: São Paulo/Brazil

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 413

Website

Re: LaTeX issue: How can I make a layout for a magazine?

If you like psbook look at pdfjam, it manipulate pdf (nup, book, join, rotate). In my experience manipulating pdf is a lot more safe/better/reliable than manipulating ps (because the psutils is severe broken), and I always generate pdf's from my latex sources (pdflatex or xelatex) because the output is better than using the dvi->ps->pdf route (microtype is really cool).