A new way to read and print double-sided paper (2016)

With a second stack you could use the original numbering of the article in an even simpler way: read a page, put it on top of another stack (no need to flip). When your original stack is empty, flip the entire second stack once. Now it's correctly ordered for the second half.

I thought the same - then it also works with binding, since you can just get to the end, flip the whole stack over, and read through the reverse sides.

That extends to triple-sided (and beyond) too, 1/8/9; 2/7/10; 3/6/11; 4/5/12.

Tend to agree. And if you rotated the "other side" pages 180 degrees (8,7,6,5) it would work even if stapled or bound -- just flip the whole thing and keep reading.

I agree. I read through a stack of academic papers yesterday. Each one was printed double-sided and stapled. Why would you not staple it? I've never had a problem reading a paper this way.

This is like some runner making a blog post about how they found a better way to run that involves alternating between running on your feet and then running on your hands as it prevents the soles of your feet from getting as worn down. No! Put some shoes on and get on with your life!

And another is that you can’t extract one chapter to take with you.

Nice explanation, thanks.

I worked on print production software. We called that style of imposition "bookwork". I once wrote a small app that'd generate those book signatures. Answer a few questions (page size, sheet size, style of binding, etc) to generate the whole production plan.

Sadly, my work (IP) was lost during a series of acquisitions. Then the whole industry segment imploded (ebooks, composite on demand printing, etc).

Anyone wanting to do print production (eg litho) bookwork today would probably start with EFI's Metrix, which I've never seen or used. But I know the creator (Rohan Holt) and prepress is his thing.

https://www.efi.com/products/productivity-software/impositio...

From the previous post:

“Can you come up with a good algorithm to read a stack of triple-sided sheets of paper? You may not be familiar with triple-sided sheets of paper, so here’s how they work: they stack nicely, just like regular sheets of paper, but you have to flip one over three times before you get back to the original side. In particular, there are two different operations you can do: call them flip (say, left-right) and anti-flip (right-left). On two-sided paper, flip and anti-flip are the same. On three-sided sheets, two flips are the same as an anti-flip, and two anti-flips are the same as a flip. Of course, three flips, or three anti-flips, are both the same as doing nothing.”

He's a mathematician. Musing about how reading a paper would be if paper had three sides. It's not a real thing.

Imagine a piece of paper with a Y shaped cross section. By smoothing down any two arms of the Y, you can read what's written there. By flipping over an arm, you can read a different side. There are three sides available.

It could be useful for origami.

"You will get a better Gorilla effect if you use as big a piece of paper as possible." -Kunihiko Kasahara, Creative Origami.

Probably a mathematical construct, like a 4-dimensional cube.

> But this is not a book, it is a stack of loose paper!

It’s a useful trick when writing in notebooks, though.