Printing Two Double-Sided Copies of an A5 Document on A4 Paper

Question

I'm using LaTeX to write a quiz for the calculus class that I'm teaching, and I'm trying to save paper by using both sides of half a sheet of A4 paper (i.e., an A5 sheet) instead of one side of an A4 sheet. I'd like to print two double-sided copies of the quiz on a single sheet of A4 paper - i.e., the front side of the A4 sheet contains two copies of page 1, and the back side contains two copies of page 2. Is there a simple way to do this in LaTeX?

Answer 1

This may be achieved by using pgfpages package that provides \pgfpageuselayout command to be put in the preambule of the document.

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,landscape]

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-5]
\end{document}

Answer 2

I've written an extension of pgfpages imaginatively called pgfmorepages (CTAN and github) which can handle repeating pages. The following code has two pages and each is repeated. Printing them out will give you two A5 double-sided copies.

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
%\url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/452197/86}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfmorepages}
\pgfmorepagesloadextralayouts

\pgfpagesuselayout{repeated 2-up}[a4paper]

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-5]
\end{document}

The resulting pages look like this:

If downloading from github, you need both pgfmorepages.sty and pgfmorepageslayouts.code.tex.