prep book for printing
HOW TO OPEN A FILE ON THE COMPUTER
we're gonna prep here a book for perfect binding by hand. im gonna print it on a LASER PRINTER which you should get: low end inkjet printers or anything ever made by hp only prints as a side-effect of its main purpose, which is to parasitically torture money out of boomers. never buy anything from hp! laser printers are made for small businesses so it actually matters if they print things. get a cheapo brother monochrome one and it'll just work, it's crazy, trust me.
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im gonna be processing a book here i scraped down from Somewhere. just follow the steps that are relevant. our goal is to end up with black-on-white thing thats 8.5x5.5, because we're gonna make this by folding US Letter (8.5x11) pages in half.
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meet your new best friend and worst enemy: gimp. go install it. if you already have photoshop installed you can probably skip this entire prep part.
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open the pages in gimp
you can open a pdf in gimp, its layers become the pages. do it at 300dpi! 300dpi is the point of diminishing returns for raster image printing and its always looked just fine to me.
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...but im opening a bunch of images, so we'll address the dpi later
i'm not saying gimp is your new worst enemy to be some kind of funny guy. much like every single other piece of software written by the GNU Project, its mostly written by an unending horde of teenagers and european "bartleby the scrivener" types flinging patches at a wad while being overseen and/or degraded by some vassal having a mid-life crisis. so its like if a swiss army knife was made without anyone having ever considered how the thing will fit into a human hand. i say this to prepare you for how im about to tell you how to open multiple image files in gimp at once.
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we want these to be separate layers of the same image, because that's how we'll export something as a multiple page pdf later. START BY OPENING JUST ONE IMAGE. if you try to open multiple images at once they will open up in separate tabs, and if its a 300 page book you should either go read a different book or rip the power cord out of your wall to make it stop
if youre old and a weiner like me and you have a mouse then its probably more ergonomic to just get ready to drag and drop. dont ask me why im putting php files into gimp its a long story theyre actually jpgs tho trust me
now create a cheeky lil layer group by clicking the folder with the plus sign on it. we're gonna dump the rest a the book in 'ere
ok. time to open more images. im gonna sound like a maniac with how specifically im describing these steps. if you think im crazy then go ahead open it some other way. have fun with that. you actually have to do it all this way to not have to do absolute migraine-inducingly tedious bullshit later.
click your next image. REMEMBER it like a card you drew out of a magicians hand.
SCROLL to the bottom and shift-click the last page. this defines the rage of pages and like half of gimps understanding of what order to load the pages in. NEXT, WITHOUT GODDAMN TOUCHING ANYTHING ELSE...
scroll back up, click and drag the FIRST ITEM OF THE SELECTION into gimp. pray. and everything will actually load in order.
you seriously have to do this. i doubted myself while writing this about the last step, and dragged some other one in first, and gimp was softlocked loading things from page 50-100 (say) then 1-50 while i wrote basically the rest of this guide.
cleaning up pages
hopefully all of your files are now in gimp. if you couldnt figure out the above, please message me! i have screwed around with my gimp install a lot and could v well be forgetting something. i am trying to make this as accessible as possible and not assume any technical knowledge beforehand
your first problem will immediately be that you have a ton of layers open at once and its probably making your computer scream.
click the eye next to the layer group to make them all go away, then scroll down and shift-click the eye next to the first layer to make it so you're only looking at that one. hopefully the way this works makes some kind of intuitive sense.
you may want to delete the front and back cover (i did for this).