mpage on Linux has the power to let you
manipulate your PS file printing. For more detail,
see mpage man page. Here, some examples
are given to show its usage (on our LexMark
Postscript printers):
If you have a big PS documentation file and you want to print it in
much compact way, you
can put two pages on one sheet:
mpage -2 -P mypsfile.psIf you don't want boundary line surrounding each page:
mpage -2o -P mypsfile.ps-P means the default printer spool (lp in most situation, and tuna in CMRP working group)
If you hope to further reduce the paper consuming, you can put two pages
on each side of
a sheet (double-side printing) by the following steps:
Step 1 - printing odd number of the sheets:
mpage -2ovr -P -j 1%2 mypsfile.ps-r generates a reverse printing, so there's no need for post paper arrangement job.
Step 2 - remove the last sheet if the reporting total printing sheet
from step 1 (-v option)
is an odd number, and replace all remaining sheets back to tray blank
side down (rotate
180 degree if you want to turn pages horizontally while reading, or
don't rotate if you want
to turn pages vertically)
Step 3 - printing even number of the sheets:
mpage -2or -P -j 2%2 mypsfile.psYou got a nice tight copy for your document with 4 pages a sheet.
In many cases the PS document leaves quite wide margin space surrounding
text. This is
not an issue when you have normal printing of one page on one sheet.
But when you print
compact copy, you hope to exploit these margin space to make the text
area more readable.
You can expand the text area using -M
option with negative margin value:
mpage -2ovr -M-40 -P -j 1%2 mypsfile.ps
mpage -2or -M-40 -P -j 2%2 mypsfile.psYou can also add -S option to have uneven expansion (more in vertical), but this has some