{"id":232,"date":"2004-02-07T21:35:00","date_gmt":"2004-02-07T21:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bolis.com\/testwp\/story\/printing-greeting-cards-in-linux\/"},"modified":"2016-11-27T08:43:49","modified_gmt":"2016-11-27T08:43:49","slug":"printing-greeting-cards-in-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bolis.com\/amillar\/printing-greeting-cards-in-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing Greeting Cards in Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Linux in a Nutshell
\"cover\"
Amazon\"\"<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Powells<\/a>
IndieBound<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Many people are familiar with the “print your own greeting card” idea. You print four small page images on a single sheet of paper and fold it in half twice. You get a little greeting card with a custom cover and interior, all from one single-sided piece of paper.<\/p>\n

I wanted to do this from a Linux application, without needing Windows or MacOS. Preferably, I could use any application to produce 4 pages, and have some magic transform it into the single page with all parts reduced and oriented properly for folding.<\/p>\n

After a little googling<\/a>, I was able to find this list archive message<\/a> by Ronan Heffernan describing exactly what I wanted. His “make_card” script takes a postscript file and does the appropriate transformation: <\/p>\n

#!\/bin\/shcat $1 | pstops -pletter -b “4:3U@.5(1w,1h)+0U@.5(.5w,1h)+1@.5(0,0)+2@.5(.5w,0)” > $2<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This works well, but I wanted something that my family could use from
Linux apps without the command line. <\/p>\n

My favorite print spool tool in Linux is KPrinter<\/a> from KDE<\/a> 3.0. It can be used with any X Window application, not just KDE apps. It is perfect<\/i> for the generic X apps like
Mozilla<\/a> and Acrobat Reader<\/a>. Instead of sending print output to the command lpr, send it to the command kprinter (or kprinter –stdin if it pipes it).<\/p>\n

The method I found is to create a “prefilter” for KPrinter. This
allows you to select greeting card formatting for any print job to
any printer.<\/p>\n

Create the following files:<\/p>\n

\n

\/usr\/share\/apps\/kdeprint\/filters\/Greeting-card-4-up.desktop<\/h3>\n

[KDE Print Filter Entry]Comment=Greeting card- 4 pages on double-folded US letterMimeTypeIn=application\/postscriptMimeTypeOut=application\/postscriptRequire=exec:\/ps2ps<\/p>\n

\/usr\/share\/apps\/kdeprint\/filters\/Greeting-card-4-up.xml<\/h3>\n

<!DOCTYPE kprintfilter><kprintfilter name=”Greeting-card-4-up” ><filtercommand data=”pstops -pletter -b ‘4:3U@.5(1w,1h)+0U@.5(.5w,1h)+1@.5(0,0)+2@.5(.5w,0)’ %filterinput %filteroutput” \/> <filterinput><filterarg format=”%in” name=”file” \/> <filterarg format=”” name=”pipe” \/> <\/filterinput> <filteroutput><filterarg format=”> %out” name=”file” \/> <filterarg format=”” name=”pipe” \/><\/filteroutput><\/kprintfilter><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found that the KDE prefilters were not terribly well documented, but I
was able to muddle through it. To create one, run KPrinter and select
“System Options”. In the print configuration dialog box, select “Commands”.
This will allow you to create a new filter. You simply need to compare the
entries to other existing print filters.<\/p>\n

When your new filter is created, it will be in your personal directory, such as<\/p>\n

$HOME\/.kde\/share\/apps\/kdeprint\/filters\/<\/p>\n

Move it to your system-wide print filter directory, which might be<\/p>\n

\/usr\/share\/apps\/kdeprint\/filters\/<\/p>\n

or something similar.<\/p>\n

I could not get the paper size to work automatically using the poorly-documented
paper size substitution variable, so I had to hard-code the US Letter paper
size. If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know.<\/p>\n