Print two-sided B5 book on A4 “corners”

Question

I have a B5 thesis to print and the printing houses proposed me to print and bind it on A4 paper and then make two cuts.

I've used the crop package but the problem is for twoside document, you can only use the "center" option with this package, and I need to have the odd pages in the top-left corner and the even pages in the top-right corner to print recto-verso and make only two cuts.

Any hint ?

Answer 1

Maybe you can use a4paper to specify the paper size, and manually play with margins? For example, if you are using B5, then the page width is 176mm. Assume you want 25.4mm margins on the page, this leaves 176 - (2 * 25.4) = 125.2mm width for text. The pagewidth is 250mm, so the total text height should be 250 - (2 * 25.4) = 199.2mm So you can set

\setlength{\textwidth}{125.2mm}
\setlength{\textheight}{199.2mm}

in the preamble. Now, A4 paper has width 210mm, so the difference is 210 - 176 = 34mm. You want the odd pages on top left, and even pages on the top right, so you set

\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0mm}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{34mm}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0mm}

(since 25.4mm is added to the values of \oddsidemargin, \evensidemargin, and \topmargin automatically). This should get you what you want.

Answer 2

\usepackage[a4paper,layout=b5paper]{geometry} comes close, but doesn't do the even-odd trick you're looking for. You can probably achieve it using the lower-level options of the package, though.

Also, maybe zwpagelayout can help?

Answer 3

memoir should be able to help you. You might want to try something like this:

\documentclass[b5paper,twoside]{memoir}
\usepackage{showframe}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[toc,math]{blindtext}
\setstocksize{297mm}{210mm}
\checkandfixthelayout
\begin{document}
    \blinddocument
\end{document}