Makebook: For Printing, Folding, and Binding

Makebook is a script for impressing pdf pages; in other words, for taking a normal pdf and rearranging them to place multiple pages on the same target sheet, so that they can be printed, folded, and bound. Although it is a simple script (less than seven hundred lines at last count), it's still extremely configurable and quite powerful for its task.

Makebook is written entirely in POSIX-compatible shell, usually called with /bin/sh. As such, it's about as portable as a shell script can be. It does have a few dependencies, to take advantage of several very powerful tools that already exist for manipulating pdfs. It also has very complete documentation, to help you learn how to use its many configuration options.

Finally, though it seems unlikely that makebook would ever be a vector for an attack, it goes out of its way to make that impossible. Temporary files are randomly named in order to prevent race conditions, new files are set with restrictive permissions, and so forth. Makebook is a program that you can trust.