Commercial stock printing with LaTeX (prefer memoir, if possible)

Question

In paragraph 2 of Section 2.2 of texdoc memoir, I quote

... with one page per piece of stock. In commercial printing the stock material is much larger with several pages being printed on each stock piece; the stock is then folded, cut and trimmed to form the final pages for binding. The class assumes that desktop publishing is the norm.

Is it possible to configure memoir to output large stock, multi-page per sheet PDF's, like in commercial printing?

If it is not possible to use memoir for this, my solution chain would be:

1. Use memoir ordinarily, with \documentclass[showtrims]{memoir}, among other options.
2. Output single-page per sheet PDF.
3. Use another tool to output the desired large stock, multi-page per sheet PDF. What tool is best for this?

Answer 1

Your best tool here, following your alternative solution chain, would be the pdfpages package in conjunction with the geometry package as layout support. Here is an example:

1. Assume your original document mydoc.tex is typeset in the memoir documentclass. Don't use the showtrims documentclass option, since page frames will be added by the pdfpages packages¹. Let's hypothetically say the document is typeset on US letter paper (8.5in by 11in using the letterpaper documentclass option).

2. Compile mydoc.tex to produce mydoc.pdf.

3. Create a new file called final.tex that looks like this:

   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{pdfpages}% http://ctan.org/pkg/pdfpages
   \usepackage[paperwidth=20in,paperheight=12in]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
   \pagestyle{empty}% No page headers/footers
   \begin{document}
   \includepdf[pages=-,nup=2x1,frame,delta=2cm 0,noautoscale]{mydoc}
   \end{document}
   

   This includes all pages from mydoc.pdf (using pages=-), adds a frame/border around each page for trimming (using frame), puts 2 pages on one sheet (using nup=2x1), adds a gap of 2cm horizontally between each imported page (using delta=2cm 0) and does not scale the included pages (using noautoscale). Also, the final sheet is set to 20in by 12in using geometry to replicate your "commercial stock".

   

   If using LaTeX for creating the second document is not your thing, then could use a command-line approach with a tool like pdfnup. It forms part of the PDFjam software package. As you will see, pdfnup (or PDFjam) uses the pdfpages package to create its output.

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¹ You could use the memoir documentclass option showtrims if you already have printing margins included in your document. However, this depends on the eventual output of your document.