Lifetime Account Book Project

Christopher Swingley

Introduction

This isn't a traditional account book, but is a journal book for keeping track of my personal history in a more abbreviated form than a traditional journal. Each page has four months on it, and in 192 pages my account book will take me to age 63. Filling out the earlier pages will be sort of like writing my own biography, but going forward, it should be fairly easy to come up with the six or seven important events in each month. The book will be basically the same as my First Journal book but it'll have months, years, and page numbers already printed.

Generating the signatures

I typeset the account book using pdfTeX on full size paper. The font is Adobe Jenson, 1.3 times larger than the default 11 point size. Since the writing is just the months and years, it doesn't need to be as large as it would be if I was printing text for reading. The book contains the month and year, four months to a page, from my birth month to when I'll be 63. Based on the size of my writing, I'll get six lines per month of my life, and that seems like plenty. Even adding details like what books I was reading, music I was listening to, and the details of the other people in my life, I should still have enough room.

Once I was happy with the formatting and layout, I used the following commands to produce the PDF I had printed:

• pdftex account.tex -- Produce a single page PDF of the book.
• pdftops account.pdf -- Convert the PDF to PostScript so I can manipulate the pages with the psutils suite of commands.
• cat account.ps | psresize -w8.925in -h11.55in -W8.5in -H11in \ -- Slightly enlarge the original paper size so the margins are narrower in the final output. Tweaking these and the next set of numbers is critical in getting the output sized and located properly on the page. (Note that this command and the next two are part of the same command. The output on one is passed to the next through a pipe.)
• | pstops "2:0(-37,0),1(5,0)" \ -- Move the text block to the left for even pages, and to the right for odd pages. This increases the width of the gutter.
• | psbook -s32 | psnup -2 > account_book.ps -- Rearrange the pages into 32 page (16 leaves, 8 sheets) signatures, format them two to a page, and put the result into a file.
• ps2pdf account_book.ps -- the 'psutils' programs mess with the ability to print the result in a duplex printer, so I convert the final PostScript back to PDF. I've found that pretty much any printing place knows how to handle PDF, so it's probably a better final format the PostScript, even if technically it isn't.

The end result is a 192 page book, printed on 48 sheets of short-grain Mohawk Superfine 28/70# paper.

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[ Page last updated 12-Aug-2006 ]