Re: mirrored pages

[Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi>]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007, Horacio Suarez wrote:
> Is there a way to obtain a mirrored pdf?

Mirrored in what way? (I use Acrobat when necessary, but I'm not familiar 
with the plug-ins, which is why I have to ask...)


Do you mean mirror margins, i.e. inside and outside margins instead of 
left and right? For double-sided printing? Are you doing your pdf from 
ConTeXt source or do you just want to rearrange an existing pdf for mirror 
margin layout?

Mirror margins can be done in ConTeXt code. This wiki page gives the first 
hint on margins: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Layout
Note that you always layout the 'odd' page, i.e the right-hand page and 
then define a double-sided layout (nb. even though the command 
\showlayout will give you several pages of layout, it will *only* show 
the right-hand layout - look at the text itself to make sure you got the 
mirror margins right).


I frankly don't know if my solution is the most elegant one, but this 
works for me:

\setuplayout
      [footer=1cm,
      backspace=5.5cm, %inside margin
      width=12cm] %textwidth, leaves 3.5cm for outside margin on A4

\setuppagenumbering
 	[alternative=doublesided, %this is where doublesided comes in
 	location={header,margin}] %pagenumber location

If you use the above page number location, the page number is placed just 
outside of outer margin in the header and you can see very easily if 
mirroring is in place.


I'm not sure if rearranging existing pdf works A4->A4, but if you need to 
do a book layout or leaflet or something similar, "imposition" is the term 
you want and pdfarrange can be the answer, see 
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Imposition for more information and tips.



The other meaning for 'mirrored':
Do you, for some reason, really want to mirror a page like a mirror 
would reflect it, i.e. text backwards etc? Like for printing on t-shirt 
transfer?

I don't know if this can be done... I'd assume ConTeXt or texexec knows 
how to do it, I just haven't needed to find out (yet). :-)



Hope this helps,

Mari
(who found out about mirrored margins with the trial-and-error method 
before the wiki existed...)