Möbius Printing Helper | Hacker News Reader

Möbius Printing Helper

shreevatsa.net

276 pointstta55 comments

This is one of those pieces of content that makes me so happy that I know about HN.

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.

Potentially out of place, but my oh my is this community the best.

Same sentiment here.

Among things like this that I've learnt to do better after not even thinking there was a point for most of my existence, one that has been a (small) life-changer for me is shoe lacing. I've known how to do that well enough since childhood, yet there were much better ways I've discovered thanks to https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ .

It's shared several times a year on HN, but it really deserves it.

I've taught myself to use the Ian Knot instead of the Granny Knot and my life is improved for it. Every time I tie my shoes I think of how much better the Ian Knot is.

At first I thought this was going to be about looping a tractor fed printer's paper back into itself to print double sided.

This is an interesting way to do present something if you are reading it once and don't need it for reference material. Needing to find a specific page only to have topics interleaved might make searching disorienting.

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's didn't hold a lot so this could drastically increase the time between needing to interact with the player.

From your comment I would conclude that is not exactly the same mechanism. For the moebius printing, the pages are flipped individually while the stack of records is flipped as a whole.

Speaking of, this flipping methodology doesn't feel like the most natural to me. Just from the initial diagram I'd imagined myself putting aside sheet 1 in a new stack, then sheet 2 on top, and so on, every new sheet going on top of the previous one and facing forward. And then upon arriving to the last sheet you flip the whole stack over.

Out of curiosity, why 1/5 2/6 3/7 4/8 and not something like 1/8 2/7 3/6 4/5 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.

It’s obviously not meant for stapled.

For the advantage see point 2. under Why would you want to do this?

the main difference is that you can't have pages 4 and 5 side by side with the proposed method, since they are back to back on the same sheet.

edit: thih9 linked to the hn post on byorgey original blog post in 2016 and the highest comment by audeyisaacs suggests the same thing you did and got a reply from byorgey who liked the idea and added it to their blog, and outlined the pro's and con's of your suggestion.

https://byorgey.wordpress.com/how-to-print-things/

Surprised to not see the word "collate" or "collation" in this article, as they relate to that specific way of printing pages in the right side/ordering for what would become a 'book(let)'.

Reading this was very satisfying and brought a smile to my face, but I can't picture a situation where I wouldn't just staple the pages together for any document over a few pages. And if it'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 "How to print things" by Brent Yorgey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803895 (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 am not so sure. With normal order, if I want to get to page 63 out of 100 pages, I will randomly pick the middle and scan linearly until I hit 63.

With this one, I know the last page is around 50 in the normal order. So I will just invert the stack and scan linearly for 63 from the bottom.

Also is you want to jump to page 63 its not enough to find the place to jump to, you also need to flip each page individually and put in back of the stack to have proper ordering. You cant just take stack of 62 pages and put in to the bottom.

And if you don't know exactly how many pages there are? Normaly you would just do binary search.

If pages are numbered, the largest page number is still on last page. Just look there.

Or alternatively: The first step of your binary search is to look at the page number on the flip side of page 1 and determine to flip the stack or not.

Why? You can just binary search. It'll take about 5 page turns. It's not like you can go to 77th page in one go, you need to "sort of" binary search in normal order as well since you don't know exactly where page 77 is. You just now it's somewhere around 3/4 of the way.

I can’t fathom the cumulative carbon savings from a helper tool which universally prints double sided correctly.

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.

the current default printing order seems correct to me if you turn it into a booklet, if you are reading it as a bunch of unbound paper then this way seems more efficient.

Paper is pretty close to a carbon sink, so the more CO2 you sequester.

How much CO2 is sequestered in a sheet of paper, vs how much CO2 is needed to turn trees into paper?

I don't know but I'm pretty sure my first Google result for that conflates source and sink: https://www.standardcarbon.com/2008/06/do-you-really-need-to...

The problem is that most paper that goes to general trash ends up being burnt or degraded by fungi in a landfill, releasing carbon back to the atmosphere.

I remember years ago (before phones/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.

Nowadays you can carry 1gb in your pocket, the only downside being power.

I used to do the PocketMod[1] thing in the pre-smartphone days. It was a lot more usable to me than a PDA. (I ended using the Palm Pilot I bought just for playing games. >smile<)

[1] https://pocketmod.com/

1gb in your pocket? I'd wager you could easily carry 1PB in your pockets without being too uncomfortable.

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'll ask you to re-print it out the "normal" way. It's the same problem we see with the Dvorak keyboard. A "good enough" 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.

Well, that, but also the whole "trend away from printed media" thing.

Unfortunately, many academic papers are rendered in such a way that reading them from a phone is painful, so printing is one way to make the text accessible away from a desktop.

Another reason is that many people need paper to underline, mark, jot and otherwise annotate the text while reading, to understand it properly. It's still easiest to do on paper.

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.

Place the sheet to the side, forming a new stack. Don’t turn the page, just set it on top of the new pile, which you turn over in full and keep reading when done with the first half.

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.

It's easier if you use A4, so that the ending page (A5) has the same ratio of the original.

Reading technical papers that were typeset with A4 (or worse, US letter) in mind, and printing those in an A5 booklet does not make for a pleasant reading experience.

Get yourself an A3 printer?

If you're using same amount of paper at the end, why bother with a bigger device with higher maintenance costs?

Edit: Some to same. Big Sur's autocorrect is a bit too aggressive it seems.

So you can save your eyes the strain of trying to read A4 pages at A5 size? Wasn’t that what the original issue was?

Stapling normal sheets from a corner doesn't have a net disadvantage when compared to booklet printing (when reading papers). Booklet allows saving paper by printing in a easily manageable format (you don't need to cut papers in half to read them properly) in a smaller form factor.

So, printing in booklet is just a convenient way to automatically downscale documents, nothing more, at least in this context.

But scaling down from A4 to A5 makes the text less readable.

Not all staplers can reach the middle of an A4 page.

Sew it. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/educational/booka...

This. I just carry a pen, needle (foldable cushion thingy), thread, and my smartphone around university. Or I would if everything wasn't remote right now.

As long as you have access to printers, paper, and a way to store the latter, you don't really need more.

Can't just shove your ordinary stapler into your pocket, though I have seen tiny models. So it's really nice if you don't want to carry around a bag.

Seems like an invention that probably already exists: a pocketable handheld stapler, you load a single staple, push the device into the groove of some folded pages, staple exits the guide and pierced to other side (probably stabbing you!), tool is applied in a different way to bend over the staples from said other side. Booklet!

Not a portable solution, but I've definitely done something like this for making booklets.

1. Open up a regular stapler surface mode. 2. use a flattened shipping box as a backing surface, to give your fingers a break from the stabbing. 3. Staple through. 4. pull the paper and the staples up. 5. Start bending the staples down with pliers, to get a nice distinct fold started. 6. Bend the rest of the way by hand. 7. Masking tape the edge. (or, for more visual flair, washi tape).

I imagine you could also do something like hammer the staples a bit, but the tape really helps ensure the staples don't catch.

The staples won't have inward curve that staplers usually apply as the standard anti-catch measure, but I like this actually--combined with the tape, everything sits more flush.

Just open the stapler in half and staple on something soft. Most office upholstery doesn't mind being stapled (loosely woven thick fibers do not get damaged).

Get yourself a rotating 360 stapler. Great for booklets. Cheaper and less clumsy than a saddle stitch or long reach stapler. Good for regular stapling too.

This is amazing! I didn't realize this was a thing. You've made my world a little bit bigger and richer today, thank you.

Print it on A7 paper and fold into an A8 booklet. Most staplers can reach the middle of an A7 page. Be sure to keep a magnifying glass around at all times though :p

If you have scissors you can print a bunch of tiny pages on one piece of regular paper and fold it like a pocket mod: https://pocketmod.com/howto

Any printer that can handle A4 can handle A5.

Just do a standard double-sided print on Letter/A4 paper, then put 5 or 6 staples down the left side, very close to the edge to bind the pages together. Then fold the edge of the binding over, creasing it, so that the booklet lays flat.

These single function PDF tools (link is a page reordering tool) are popular on HN right now, huh.

Yesterday we had a pdf binder that uses pdf merge from a popular pdf library. On mobile or I'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.

Because this is really interesting.

But what I want is a printed document.

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

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