Page Layout ⇒ Split A4 Paper into four A6 Areas

[olh]

My goal is to have four DIN A6 areas on a sheet of DIN A4 paper, in landscape direction.

Initial attempts with a table did not work. The description of "picture" sounds like the box can be placed anywhere with the xoffset and yoffset parameter. But this does apparently not work. As a result only the first area appears in the right place, all others are missing or misplaced.

So my question is: how to I define 4 areas of text, one of them should be in portrait. Is the latter even possible?

The circle in the following examples are just a helper for me to indicate where the boxes will finally appear in the document. They will be removed in the final version.

Thanks for the help.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,landscape]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[margin=10mm]{geometry}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage{helvet}
%
% DIN A4 paper, 4 independent areas (DIN A6)   
% each area 148.5x105.0mm, border 10mm
% landscape | portrait
% landscape | landscape
%
\begin{document}
  \setlength{\unitlength}{1mm}

  \begin{picture}(128.5,85.0)(0,0)
    \put(0,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,0){%
      \makebox(128.5,85.0){%
        \fontsize{15}{19}
        \selectfont
        \parbox{128.5mm}{%
          \bfseries
          \begin{center}
            Head line
          \end{center}

          Long line which is supposed to wrap nicely.
          \newline\newline
          Second long line which is supposed to wrap nicely.
        }% end of parbox
      }% end of makebox
    }% end of put
  \end{picture}

  \begin{picture}(128.5,85.0)(0,95.0)
    \put(0,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,0){%
      \makebox(128.5,85.0){%
        \fontsize{16}{20}
        \selectfont
        \parbox{128.5mm}{%
          \bfseries
          \begin{center}
            Head line
          \end{center}
          \normalfont
          A long paragraph which is supposed to wrap nicely.
        }% end of parbox
      }% end of makebox
    }% end of put
  \end{picture}

  \begin{picture}(128.5,85.0)(128.5,0)
    \put(0,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,0){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(128.5,85){\circle{1}}
    \put(0,0){%
      \makebox(128.5,85.0){%
        \fontsize{15}{19}
        \selectfont
        \parbox{128.5mm}{%
          \bfseries
          \begin{center}
            Head line
          \end{center}
          \normalfont
          A long paragraph which is supposed to wrap nicely.
        }% end of parbox
      }% end of makebox
    }% end of put
  \end{picture}
\end{document}

[localghost]

My goal is to have four DIN A6 areas on a sheet of DIN A4 paper, in landscape direction. […]

The comments in your code example indicate that one of the A6 pages shall be in portrait format. This can't work due to missing space (unless I misunderstood something).

Write the pages in a single document each with A6 as paper format (i.e. by using the geometry package for the paper dimensions) and compile them to PDF. Afterwards merge those pages 2×2 on an A4 page by the pdfpages packages.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[mas]

A slightly different approach is to use pdfnup from TeXLive to merge the six a6 pages into one a4 page. You can try the following, say as a6.tex :

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
%
  \usepackage[a6paper]{geometry}
  \usepackage[english]{babel}
  \usepackage[math]{blindtext}

\begin{document}
  \blinddocument
\end{document}

Compile this as

Code: Select all

pdflatex a6
pdfnup --a4paper --nup 2x3 --no-landscape --scale 1 a6.pdf

This will output the file a6-nup.pdf in the current directory. Play with the options of the geometry package to get the margins correctly.

Regards.

[olh]

Thanks for the feedback.

With pdfpages I can merge the two landscape A6 pages into a single portrait A4 page.
However, the third A6 page in portrait format gets rotated during that merge.

I think a way to get around this is to have the third A6 page also in landscape format and rotate the text in it, so that it appears as portrait.

But how do I do that? My attempts with the rotating package do not work.

[localghost]

[…] With pdfpages I can merge the two landscape A6 pages into a single portrait A4 page.
However, the third A6 page in portrait format gets rotrated during that merge.

I think a way to get around this is to have the third A6 page also in landscape format and rotate the text in it, so that it appears as portrait. […]

pdfpages can do the rotation for you. Just take a look at its manual.

[olh]

I don't see how it can do that. I have "landscape-a6-1.pdf", "landscape-a6-2.pdf", "portrait-a6-1.pdf". With these I create a merged-pages.pdf:

Code: Select all

\includepdf[nup=1x1, landscape, pages=1]{landscape-a6-1.pdf}
\includepdf[nup=1x1, landscape, pages=1]{landscape-a6-2.pdf}
\includepdf[nup=1x1  landscape, pages=1]{portrait-a6-1.pdf}

I tried to rotate the "portrait-a6-1.pdf" with pdf90 or pdftk, but the resulting PDF file is not accepted by pdfpages:

./merged-pages.tex:7: Package calc Error: `l' invalid at this point.

That's the command to finally merge all that into a single A4 page:

Code: Select all

\includepdf[nup=2x2, turn=false, pages=1-3]{merged-pages.pdf}

[localghost]

And \includepdfmerge does not help?

[olh]

Thanks, this does indeed help:

Code: Select all

\includepdfmerge[nup=2x2]{landscape-a6-1.pdf, landscape-a6-2.pdf, portrait-a6-1.pdf}