I'm working on a publication for my wife. I can't say more because it's really hush-hush (nuclear secrets, you know). We decided to print it on 5.5"x8.5" paper, which the astute among you may recognize as a half-sheet of US Letter size paper. We just didn't need a larger size (atoms are pretty small). The hard part was getting OpenOffice.org to double up the pages.

My first try was to change the page to Landscape and create two columns. That worked, but the page numbers got messed up and I couldn't find an analogous "column number" field. That's a problem because we use automatic tables of contents and indexes extensively.

I figured that ps2ps would help me, but going OO.org->PDF->PS seemed to lose quality. It shouldn't have, but it sure did, so that's out. The President just isn't going to stand for that.

Luckily today I found the solution, pdfnup which is part of the PDFJam suite of tools. It's designed for exactly this sort of task. Here's the command I used:

$ pdfnup NuclearResearch.pdf --nup 2x1 \
  --paper letterpaper --orient landscape \
  --openright true --outfile 2up-NuclearResearch.pdf