printing multiple separate pictures on one physical paper page with terminal

Question

I have multiple .png files (for example: pic_001.png, pic_002.png... pic_200.png). These are basically separate pages of the book.

I want to create a single printing job, that will print 2 such pictures per one physical page, so it would look like a usual book spread.

I've tried to do this like this:

lp pic_001.png pic_002.png pic_003.png pic_004.png -d color-printer-1 -o sides=one-sided -o number-up=2

but it was printing only 1 picture per 1 page.

The same result with the for-loop:

for i in `seq 1 2 8`; do lp pic_00$i.png pic_00$[$i + 1].png -d color-printer-1 -o sides=one-sided -o number-up=2; done

but also this creates separate jobs per pair of pictures.

Answer 1

Rather than use lp directly, you could try using imageMagick, to make one image out of two or more images, and then print them

convert image1.png image2.png image3.pgn -append output.png

will put the images one above the other. If you replace -append by +append, the images will be side-by-side instead.

Answer 2

lp doesn't know about image files; it can defer that to device-specific drivers, using options which exercise features "likely" to be supported by a variety of devices. The lp manual page does not list any suitable option for your purpose.

Instead, if you want multiple image files to display on a single sheet of paper, you can do this by combining images into single-page images in the arrangement you want. Programs such as ImageMagick are useful for this.

Further reading:

• Is it possible to combine 4 Images into one png??????
• How do I combine two or more images to get a single pdf file?