Why did I write https://pdfimpose.it, and why do I maintain it? Because I love books and bookbinding. 📖🪡✂️
Official profile of the free #pdfimpose and associated PDF manipulation tools.
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pdfimpose
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I added small pieces of strong paper while binding the book, so that the binding is thicker than the remaining part of the book. My child wanted to do their own herbarium, so the thicker binding is there to anticipate the flowers and leaves that will be pasted on the pages. 🌺🌿🥀🍀🌼🍂🪻
The same trick can be used to bind a photo album.
The same trick can be used to bind a photo album.
🧵 2/2 Writing documentation is difficult, and maybe not as rewarding as writing code ("Improved documentation" is less impressive than "Fixed bug X. Added feature Y."). As the author and (maybe?) main user of my tool, it is very valuable to have an outside point of view about it. So:
- Thanks a lot to PD Hall for his/her contribution!
- If you cannot code, proofreading and improving the documentation of that small project you use, maintained by only one person, might be greatly appreciated.
🧵 1/2
Wow! Someone cared enough about one of my tools that (s)he (?) spent some time contributing to it!
I have been tirelessly maintaining a handful of free projects for more than ten years, with a few bug reports, and maybe one code contribution.
It is the second time, though, that someone contributes by proofreading the entire documentation of one of my projects: minor issues like grammar errors, bigger issues like rewriting whole parts of the documentation.
🚄 Another train journey, another feature: you can now choose the "writing order" of pdf pages with the "N-up" schema: https://www.pdfimpose.it/?layout=pdfautonup
This had been requested by *two* users! To be honest, the first one is me, the second one is someone who did not like the default, arbitrary, order. Will it be useful to a third one? Who knows?
(I like lonely train journeys because I can focus on something during a few hours.)
Enjoy!
Several imposition layouts are available with https://pdfimpose.it: the usual hardcover and saddle stich, the peculiar one-page-zine, and a few others. I wondered which were used the most: here are the results with 6643 imposed files.
I am not surprised that hardcover and saddle stitch are used a lot. I am happy that n-up and cards, which I use daily at work, are used a lot. As expected, very few people use the unusual ones, or the ones I made up.
📈 See you later for enthralling statistics!
The latest improvement came a bit more than one year ago, with https://pdfimpose.it, a web frontend to pdfimpose. It was prompted by my wife, who wanted to use pdfimpose with a graphical interface.
See you in ten years!
I later noticed that I could use the "cards" imposition schema at work (https://www.pdfimpose.it/?layout=cards): as a teacher, I often write two slightly different versions A and B of the same two-pages test, on A5 pages, which I want to print side by side on A4 paper, but I do not want the front and back pages of A and B to be mixed. Since then, at last, I am using my own software several times a week, at work…
I do not remember why (maybe I was bored?), several months or years later, I caved and implemented several other imposition schemas. While I was doing it, my wife, a school teacher, wanted to print tiny books *en masse* for her pupils, which motivated me to implement yet another imposition schema (copy-cut-fold https://www.pdfimpose.it/?layout=copycutfold). Version 2 was published in 2021.
Back then, I had been maintaining my software for six years, but I hadn't used it a single time! Excepted for tests, obviously…
Over the years, people opened issues asking for other impositions schemas (one expected saddle-stich, and did not undersand what was produced by pdfimpose ; another asked if pdfimpose was able to produce one-page-zine). I first said "no", but…