BindBook - a package for creating bound, glued, and folder books

Dick Grune

BINDBOOK is a package for creating bound, glued, and/or folder books. It assists in producing signatures ("booklets") for bound books from PostScript files, and other book-producing activities. It was written around the middle of the 1990s, when most privately affordable printers were constant-width and could not print double-sided.

• Creates signatures ("booklets") for bound books; sheets to be cut in half to create half-size stacks; and the usual 2-up sheets.
• Is the only program I know of that will produce a full set of signatures for a complete book, including the fly leaves.
• Does automatic signature balancing to avoid a final signature with one or two pages on it.
• When called twice, will produce nifty little booklets or 4-up sheets.
• Works on a range of PostScript styles.
• Can concatenate PostScript files.
• Produces two PostScript files, one to be printed on one side of the paper and on for the other side. Alternatively, produces one file, if your printer can print two-sided.
• Is adaptable to different paper sizes.
• Can be restricted to a range of pages, to replace pages lost while printing.
• Can handle both portrait and landscape input.
• Allows fine adjustments for positioning, gutter width and magnification to be specified on the command line.
• Allows multiple input files, including standard input.
• Contains mechanisms to patch up questionable PostScript input.

• You don't have to have a PostScript printer or a PostScript cartridge on your printer: GNU's program `gs' (Ghostscript) will print PostScript files on almost any printer.

• The manual page contains step-by-step recipes for creating five kinds of books (but many more variants are possible).
• The manual page contains a small glossary of bookbinding terms.
• Source code in C is supplied. It compiles under MS-DOS and UNIX, using GNU's gcc.

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