Fineprint alternative under Linux

[asteroidblitz]

I've got this handy little program which really helps me with my job:

http://www.fineprint.com/products/fi.../benefits.html

I never really appreciated it until I moved to Suse, but it's one of those little programs which keeps you hanging on to the dual boot, and copying docs from one partition to another.

Anyone out there know of anything similar for Linux?

Many Thanks

Martin

[Dolda2000]

If there is? I can't believe that they're even selling a program like this... UNIX (and thus Linux) offers you the ultimate in printing control, since the print data is postscript up until only just before it's actually sent to the printer. While there isn't a nice GUI like I guess fineprint offers, there are several PostScript pipeline filters available for you to use to reorganize print jobs.

It works somthing like this. Almost all programs allow you to specify the print command, which is usually set to something like lpr, /usr/bin/lpr or similar. I don't really know how familiar you are with shell commands, which makes this a bit difficult...
For example, if you would like to organize several pages onto one single physical page, you could use the psnup filter. Giving a print command like "psnup -4 | lpr" would print four pages on each sheet of paper.
These are the filters that are usually available:
psbook
psmerge
psnup
psresize
psselect
pstops
To get details about each individual one, check the manpage.

[xhevi]

I know this post is old, but maybe this will help other not-so-macho-in-linux people looking for how to solve this.
I ran into this a while ago, and in Linux it's a bit different than in Windows. You need no extra sw, it is standard feature of Linux print system, even though you may not know it (at least for KDE, but I believe GNOME as well).

1. If the document you want to print is pdf, open it with kpdf, choose print, go to printer properties and there is section in the general tab to print 1,2,4 pages per sheet.

2. If you have other kind of documents, choose to print them, but choose print to file option, to save the file in the *.ps format. Then open the new created file with kpdf (it will convert automatically to pdf) and follow procedure in point 1. Btw. this is also cool, no need for third party sw to make pdf from any other kind of documents.

To print double-sided, well, you need to do some maths . Combine pages for the odd set first (like for 4 pages/sheet, choose to print pages 1-4, 9-12 and so on), then put the same papers flipped on the opposite side into printer and combine the even set (5-8, 13-16 etc.)