Bookworm

What is Bookworm?

Bookworm is a program to manipulate postscript files. Along with mpage it can be used to combine and print postscript documents in a format suitable for binding.

What bookworm can do:

• Merge multiple postscript files
• Reverse the page ordering of the (possibly merged) files
• Shuffle pages suitable for printing

Usage

Bookworm first loads and scans all the files given on the command line. Once that is done it outputs each page in the supplied order. By default it does it in such an order for printing into a book. If -n is given on the command line the output is in the supplied order. Otherwise -r can be given to output the pages in reverse order.

Book order means the pages are printed in such a way, that if piped though mpage -2 and printed on a double sided printer it can be folded over to be used as a book.

By default bookworm writes it's output to stdout. This can be changed using the '-o' option to specify a filename.

Problems

When merging multiple files, bookworm just takes the preamble from the first document. Future versions should save each preamble, and use a dictionary stack to load the correct preamble for each page as it is rendered. In practical terms this means things like merging multiple files generated from TeX work fine, although merging files generated from other sources may not work.

Not enough modes. More sorting modes would be good.

Fonts. Bookworm does not generate the required list of fonts at the end.

General postscript stuff. Some of the postscript fields like '%%Pages' don't get updated correctly. Although in practice this is not a problem.

Print correct size signatures. Currently the entire file is made into one big signature. Instead it should produce a number of smaller signatures, either 16 or similar pages. Or even better a customisable number.

Reporting Bugs

To report a bug email me at bookworm at the domain nash.nu. All reported bugs will be listed here. Also feel free to submit patches for new features or any bugs.

Download

The current version is 0.1.1. It is available for download: bookworm-0.1.1.tar.gz.