What you want is placing the four flyers in 2×2 format on a sheet of A4 paper, the way they match that paper size, without any additional borders around the A4 page or between the flyers.
Therefore, when designing the flyers in OpenOffice.org Draw, you cannot use its “tile” option for printing out, as the page margins of the original flyer will get collapsed. Also, you cannot use Adobe Reader’s “multiple pages per sheet” printing option, as there is no way to eliminate the printer’s border around the whole page.
However, on Linux there is a nice tool psnup. What to do: Export your flyer to a PDF file. If you use OOo, that’s a built-in function. Then create a PDF file with four flyers, each rotated by 90°, from that. It’s difficult to use unrotated pages in A6 landscape paper size as input to psnup, as the “-l”, “-s” and “-f” options are not well documented and have unprecedented effects. So we use pdftk to rotate the pages beforehand. The command to use:
pdftk flyer.pdf cat 1E 1E 1E 1E output flyer.fourpages.pdf;
Now we need to generate PostScript, as psnup operates on that. To convert to from PDF to PostScript, one cannot use “pdftops -paperw 298 -paperh 421 flyer.fourpages.pdf” (as text is converted to images) and also not “pdf2ps flyer.fourpages.pdf;” (as this crashes). Therefore, print with Adobe Reader, using “Custom” printer, and the options “Choose paper source by PDF page size” and “Print to File”.
Now we can use psnup and after that, create a PDF again:
psnup -H 14.85cm -W 10.5cm -h 29.7cm -w 21cm -d -4 flyer.fourpages.ps flyer.4nup.ps;
ps2pdf flyer.4nup.ps;
To conclude, you can perhaps (if necessary at all) reduce the size of the PDF file to 10% by printing it in Adobe Reader to a PostScript File and converting to PDF again with ps2pdf.
The option “-d” draws a box around each of the four mounted pages, remove for production use, it’s for diagnostics only. And another note out of scope: note that the -s option expects a coefficient (0 to 1), 1 meaning to scale at 100%.
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