In comp.periphs.printers Eli the Bearded wrote:

Background:
There are a _wealth_ of public domain books that have been scanned and /
or OCRed available on the net now. These are great for reading on
computer devices, but what if I want a print copy?

I can, and have, naively send them to a local laser printer and get a
stack of US-Letter output. I don't really like the look or the usability
of that. Beyond the page count that I can easily staple, it's not a good
format.

I've done this, though I'll need some time and prodding to dig up
details. I was using the plain-text format version of novel texts.
The cover was manually designed based on a template.

Contents pages and page breaks for chapters were generated
automatically based on assumptions about the text formatting which
often needed to be adjusted for different input files. removing
the page number at the start of a chapter was probably possible but
not my preference, though they were excluded from pages preceeding
the beginning of the first chapter.

The output format was A5 pages, to be arranged into two
single-sided A4 print jobs performed in sequence to produce
double-sided A4 pages that were cut in half to produce the
double-sided A5 pages ready for perfect binding. I did all the
printing and binding myself, so this was designed to suit my own
production process.

My preference was to have the page numbers on the outside edge of
the pages, so they needed to alternate sides on each page, which
caused me a lot more trouble than it should have.

Generation of the A5 document was done in Libre Office using a
Libre Office Basic script, which was a choice I soon regretted
because a lot of things didn't seem to work properly. That produced
the A5 document in Postscript, which I reformatted into the two A4
Postscript print jobs using psutils.

I only ever attempted novels in plain text as input, never any
images. This wasn't all that long ago, but long enough that I've
forgotten further details. Scripts (I think they were pretty short,
but there were multiple versions) and examples can be dug up, but
they're messy (I didn't learn LO Basic very extensively) and done
with an "only need to work once" mindset.

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