Printing two pages on one sheet

For the stingy or the environmentally conscious. These methods also let you print four or even more pages on one sheet.

Postscript Files

Get PS Utils and then convert your file with:

psnup -2 input.ps ouput.ps

psnup is usually already present on Unix-like systems. Another commonly installed utility is mpage. Of course it is possible to set up print queues that filter through these utilities—a friendly sysadmin can set things up so the user just has to print as normal and it works.

If you have KDE installed then its programs have a graphical frontend to this n-up procedure. So you can print from kghostview and click away at the options.

Windows users

If you are lucky, your print driver may allow you to print multiple pages per sheet. Look carefully through the settings.

Otherwise you could install a printer driver that will produce fairly standard postscript such as the "Apple Color LW 12/660 PS" driver. Somewhere in the advanced settings you need to specify that the postscript output should be "optimized for portability" not for speed. Set the printer to print to file and you can produce postscript files from any application. Now apply psnup as above.

You could try installing a printer driver that will place multiple pages on one and produce postscript. This will save you from having to use psnup. Try the printer driver for the "Apple LaserWriter II NT". You will need to optimize for portability as before.

To view and print the postscript files under Windows get GSView. Note that you need to follow the instructions to get Ghostscript as well as gsview for it to work. Do not worry if the pages do not display correctly, they will probably print fine.

MS Word / Powerpoint

Some recent Windows applications can print multiple pages to one. So if you have one of these applications it might be worth seeing if the document you need to print can be opened in one of them.

Fineprint

I've had fineprint recommended to me. It does look nice, but frankly I produce and print postscript and pdf and do n-up almost daily with free software so this should really not be necessary. But if you are a Windows user this is probably your sort of thing...