The Fugue

So the hipmod is too small for you? You want to use the regular-size hipster? But by golly your printer refuses to play nicely with index cards?

Here’s a solution. Use Multivalent to 4-up index cards onto regular paper, and cut them with a guillotine. You can use cardstock for the full effect.

The trick is in printing the cards at the original size, and optimizing for trimming. Something like this:

./multivalent impose -nup 4 -sep 1 -paper 6x10in core.pdf

This gives you a 6×10-inch PDF (core-up.pdf). Now you need to print it without scaling it to letter size. That should be straightforward to figure out in your environment. Then take it to the guillotine and make your 6 cuts and pat yourself on the back. If you’re really clever and your printer has <= ⅛-inch margins you can get it down to 4 cuts.

If you want to make a lot of one card, you can do something like this:

./multivalent impose -nup 4 -page 46,46,46,46 -sep 1 -paper 6x10in core.pdf

You can even get clever and take advantage of duplex printing if your printer supports it. Sky’s the limit!