How to create a book signature from text?

Question

How can you transform a text file (plain text or HTML) or print-format file (PS or PDF) to bind it as a book using shell commands? That is, how do you create a print-format file which orders pages into signatures so that in the simple case where the number of pages is divisible by 4 per signature, pages 1, 2, N-1 and N are on the first sheet (1 and N on the same side of the sheet), 3, 4, N-3 and N-2 on the next, etc, and the next signature is equal size and starts at page N+1? It could be done by careful manipulation using pdftk or similar tools, but hopefully there are already shell tools which do this reliably and without having to for example know in advance the number of pages which will be produced or the optimum signature size.

There's already a guide using Scribus, but it involves a lot of manual steps.

Answer 1

(I don't quite penetrate the way these signatures work, so these are merely pointers...)

Given a PDF file, pdfbook from the pdfjam tool set could be a one-stop solution to this problem, from the manpage:

pdfbook makes 2-up versions of PDF files, with the pages ordered as signatures.

It depends on pdflatex and the pdfpages LaTeX package (which you could thus use directly, too).

By the way the Scribus howto ("19 easy steps") can be simplified a little using pdfjam as it provides PDF equivalents to the tools mentioned there, i.e. pdfnup instead of psnup.)

Another way is using ConTeXt, see this wiki page on "Imposition", which also includes scripts (Lua and a link to a Perl script) for "Imposition by signature". If your input is XHTML, ConTeXt could be a solution "from XHTML to book signature", see this PDF document on XHTML in ConTeXt.