Bug 109152 - Print Layout: support foldable cards (a 4 page per sheet brochure)
Summary: Print Layout: support foldable cards (a 4 page per sheet brochure)
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Printing and PDF export (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.4.0.1 rc
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 114893 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: PDF-Export
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2017-07-17 04:52 UTC by Bernd Wechner
Modified: 2022-06-16 11:08 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Document page order to print brochure correctly (8.83 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2018-03-05 11:27 UTC, Mike Sapsard
Details

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Description Bernd Wechner 2017-07-17 04:52:15 UTC
Description:
LibreOffice supports some seriously cool print layouts already.

Among them are:

n pages per sheet in one of 4 predefined orders.
Including a custom version of n x m cells. Awesome!

Brochure (which is two sides per sheet ordered in such a way that the pinted stack can be folded into a booklet, usually called Booklet mode not Brochure in other contexts I think)

The brochure is implemented separately because it has to do some smarts with print order not easily described under 2 pages per sheet. As an aside it could equally as well (arguable should) have been implemented as a custom order on 2 pages per sheet but that is a digression.

My desire is to have printable cards. They are done with 4 pages per sheet, but a specific ordering and with page rotations!

Specifically it would print one sided (I love making these with used paper, using the plain side) and a layout like this:

http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy2/Bernd_Wechner/LibreOffice%20Foldable%20Card%20layout_zps4rgxiivq.png

Which, should the link break is:

14
23

with 1 and 4 rotated 180 degrees.

This is a layout you can fold in half along the horizontal line and then again on the vertical and you have an elegant card made out of recycled paper if that's what you used.

I currently have to do this as follows:

1) Print to PDF
2) Use PDFmod to move and rotate the pages
3) Print 4 pages to the sheet in a standard mode:

12
34

The problem with this is twofold:

1) It's a lot more work
2) The page margins on the final print seem enforced (alas, I'm printing with Evince on Linux, and will look for something else if I can but have failed so far to find something that can print 4 pages to the sheet with no page margins!)

And it strikes me as a really neat value add to LibreOffice's print suite, which is easy enough to code up.

Again, I'd ordinarily think it belongs as a special layout under 4 pages per sheet, but in the current system it should probably appear as Folded Cards under Brochure (if you printed more than 4 pages the pattern I'd expect simply to repeat, so I could make up a pair of cards on 8 pages etc.)

Steps to Reproduce:
1.In LibreWriter click Print on the File Menu
2.Click the Page Layout tab
3. See the described options there

Actual Results:  
Can't do this at all.

Expected Results:
Be able to print folded cards from Writer.


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Comment 1 Buovjaga 2017-08-11 19:12:42 UTC
While you are lacking this feature, maybe you could play around with http://laidout.org/
I have not used it yet, but it is for more demanding printed layouts.
Comment 2 Buovjaga 2018-01-30 18:04:37 UTC
Pinging design team
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2018-01-31 09:03:10 UTC
In other words you request to arrange pages freely, be able to add blank or delete pages, and have the opportunity to rotate and flip the page content. Guess the print/export layout should be stored too. Nicely integrated into the new print dialog, of course.

https://pad.documentfoundation.org/p/UX-PrintDialog
Comment 4 Heiko Tietze 2018-01-31 09:03:16 UTC
*** Bug 114893 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 5 Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) 2018-01-31 09:31:03 UTC
(In reply to Bernd Wechner from comment #0)
> My desire is to have printable cards. They are done with 4 pages per sheet,
> but a specific ordering and with page rotations!
> 
> Specifically it would print one sided (I love making these with used paper,
> using the plain side) and a layout like this:
> 
> http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy2/Bernd_Wechner/
> LibreOffice%20Foldable%20Card%20layout_zps4rgxiivq.png
> 

Sounds good to me. I would just add a new option for this under the current "Brochure"
Comment 6 Bernd Wechner 2018-01-31 10:49:10 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3)
> In other words you request to arrange pages freely, be able to add blank or
> delete pages, and have the opportunity to rotate and flip the page content.
> Guess the print/export layout should be stored too. Nicely integrated into
> the new print dialog, of course.

Sounds like a nice generalisation indeed. My immediate need is the foldable card I guess, for which I have a workaround as described, albeit it cost me heaps of time to nut it out. But yes a more general way to define print layouts can't hurt and might easily help propel LibreOffice into the realm of super awesome in this space IMO. 

It's nice to see that this is being considered.
Comment 7 Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) 2018-01-31 11:07:46 UTC
See for reference the booklet types that Indesign supports: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/printing-booklets.html

I think having commonly used types as default makes more sense than having the user define how this is arranged.
Comment 8 Mike Sapsard 2018-03-05 11:27:51 UTC
Created attachment 140347 [details]
Document page order to print brochure correctly
Comment 9 Heiko Tietze 2020-08-12 10:11:55 UTC
Request was accepted by many people and implementation under the brochure option is welcome.
Comment 10 Bernd Wechner 2022-06-16 11:08:03 UTC
Had to chuckle. It's 2022 and the first time in 3 years I think that I've wanted to print such a card (COVID really killed the event to which I make invites for this way) and I consult my notes in which I have a link to this bug and see it's not moved any  ;-).

I have a process to achieve the outcome of course, using LibreOffice, and then PDFmod and then Evince, but it's a rigmarole with steps to follow ... still think it would be a feather in LibreOffice's cap to support nice flexible layout arrangement of pages like this.