Sat, 24 Nov 2007

The booklet style and pagespersignature

I use the LaTeX booklet style often to make folio-size booklets — for example, Haiku a Day has used it since it started, and so when working on a longer zine I turned to it.

The booklet style has the concept of signatures, essentially a logical grouping of pages. In actual printing it defines how many pages are printed on a large sheet of paper, which is then folded and cut in various ways to make a grouping of pages. If you look at a quality hardback book, you'll see a number of signatures that have been bound together to make your book.

The default number of pages per signature in booklet is 32, which never affected me while making Haiku a Day, which only has eight pages. The newest zine has thirty-six pages, though. It's a multiple of four so it should fit just perfectly in my layout, but I kept running into the problem where the last four pages where off grouped by themselves. This caused no end of frustration very early one morning, until I found the pagespersignature option (documentation, how wonderful). Cranking that up to forty make the new zine come out as I expected it.

Posted at: 20:03 | category: /computers/latex | Link