At the Polish print party, we tried a possible automation of the nineteen steps. We gave out numbered tickets at the entrance, and at the end there was a numbered copy of the booklet for everyone. The booklets were all different via Python and Scribus. The imposition and printing was very simple Perl.

If you just want to print a number of copies of the same booklet, grab the modified versions of the scripts, and skip step 1. The $people variable is the number of copies to be printed, and the $pubName variable is the name of your pdf file, minus .pdf extension 😉

So and then:

1. Create a .sla file by following 1 to 7 of the nineteen steps. For the importing to pdf, use layout.py, or better yet write your own script for making all the pdf documents different 🙂
2. Steps 9-13 are now handled by the printprintprint.pl script. This is imposition and the printing of even pages.

~% perl printprintprint.pl

3. When the printing is done, take the warm stack of paper and `flip and turn’ it so that your printer knows that it’s upside down.
4. Finally, the printing of the odd pages is handled by flip_and_turn.pl
   ~% perl flip_and_turn.pl

What this looks like.