Möbius Printing Helper

This is one of those pieces of content that makes me so happy that I know about HN.<p>Printing is something that I never questioned. I never needed to, but some one, some where thought about a better way. This better way solves a problem I encountered many times in college when I was copying pages of a textbook on loan from the library.<p>Potentially out of place, but my oh my is this community the best.

At first I thought this was going to be about looping a tractor fed printer&#x27;s paper back into itself to print double sided.<p>This is an interesting way to do present something if you are reading it once and don&#x27;t need it for reference material. Needing to find a specific page only to have topics interleaved might make searching disorienting.<p>A side note, boxed sets of 78 RPM records used to come like this. At the time, stacking record changers were more common. You would load a stack of records in, play one side of each as they dropped down, remove the entire stack, flip it, and play all of the other sides. 78&#x27;s didn&#x27;t hold a lot so this could drastically increase the time between needing to interact with the player.

Out of curiosity, why 1&#x2F;5 2&#x2F;6 3&#x2F;7 4&#x2F;8 and not something like 1&#x2F;8 2&#x2F;7 3&#x2F;6 4&#x2F;5 where you just flip the entire stack over at the midpoint and read from the end of the stack back to the front? That would have the advantage of working even while stapled, and requiring less flipping overall.

Surprised to not see the word &quot;collate&quot; or &quot;collation&quot; in this article, as they relate to that specific way of printing pages in the right side&#x2F;ordering for what would become a &#x27;book(let)&#x27;.

Reading this was very satisfying and brought a smile to my face, but I can&#x27;t picture a situation where I wouldn&#x27;t just staple the pages together for any document over a few pages. And if it&#x27;s a document with too many pages for that, the method here introduces additional problems, namely the ability to quickly go to a specific page.

Previous discussion about linked &quot;How to print things&quot; by Brent Yorgey: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11803895" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11803895</a> (2016).

This only works if you read all pages one by one. But if you have 100+ pages document and want to jumt to page 63 you gona have a bad time.

I can’t fathom the cumulative carbon savings from a helper tool which universally prints double sided correctly.<p>Billions of misprinted sheets must have been discarded over the years. Even more if you add the single sided prints because two sided printing was too complicated on a consumer device.

I remember years ago (before phones&#x2F;pdas) printing things really small in strange formats so you could fold and refold and cut and staple and have your notes and addresses in a small format you could carry in your pocket.<p>Nowadays you can carry 1gb in your pocket, the only downside being power.

The immediately-obvious drawback to this is large-scale mental inertia. Hand a stack of paper numbered like this to an average person and they&#x27;ll ask you to re-print it out the &quot;normal&quot; way. It&#x27;s the same problem we see with the Dvorak keyboard. A &quot;good enough&quot; method exists (QWERTY, numbering pages one at a time), so the effort willing to be expended to change it falls far below the effort needed for wide-scale adoption.<p>Well, that, but also the whole &quot;trend away from printed media&quot; thing.

The disadvantage of this technique is that you lose tactile intuition on how much of the material is remaining. And once you start on the second half of pages, you lose tactile intuition on how much you have read.

This would rock with boustrophedon script!

if you have some 4-16 pages to print, do yourself a favour and print them in booklet format and then just bind them with a stapler.<p>It&#x27;s easier if you use A4, so that the ending page (A5) has the same ratio of the original.

These single function PDF tools (link is a page reordering tool) are popular on HN right now, huh.<p>Yesterday we had a pdf binder that uses pdf merge from a popular pdf library. On mobile or I&#x27;d get the links, sorry.

I wonder if it’s possible to do this by scripting macOS Preview?

By default I print documents single sided.<p>Because this is really interesting.<p>But what I want is a printed document.

One fatal drawback is that two documents printed this way cannot be concatenated.