Need help with printing layout

[Veho]

There's this web comic I'm following, and I'd like to have a paper version to have and to hold and to flip through. I already have the two "official" books, but both are 20 pages in all and are the size of a greeting card. I'd like to have the first few hundred episodes in book form. But there's a problem.

The comics are (for the most part) uniform at 600x847 pixels. I played with page layouts a bit, and I think having the page in landscape orientation, with three strips side by side, would be the best solution. Now, here's my question.

How do I get the PC to automatically arrange all the comics that way? Give some script or program or app the comics, and have it spit out the pages with three comics per page, or just merge groups of three images into one (larger) image? I don't want to have to arrange 600 strips (200 pages) manually in Photoshop. Is there a program that can do this for me? I know image management programs have the index print option you can configure up to a point, but those I've tried don't allow three pics per page (it's either two or four) and some won't even let me place the paper in landscape mode (

). Is there a way to automate this, short of getting professional on its ass and using Quark Xpress (overkill much)?

Help

 

[FAST6191]

I have a cheap and nasty way but it does get the job done.

Step 1: realise many consecutive images -> image sequence

Step 2: presentation, perhaps something like
http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/addin/iiw.html
http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php#95976

Step 3: Stuffing multiple slides per sheet is then simple printing option (or print/export to PDF and use that instead).

 

[Veho]

Thank you

Okay, tried with the Image Importer Wizard, but I can't set the slide format (or aspect ratio) to A4 so I get large margins and things resize oddly. This leaves large spaces between the actual images on the printed page, and the images are too small to read. So I gave up on this format, stuffed everything into Word, and with some rather clever use of margins and some rather less clever sheer bloody mindedness, and a few hours of tweaking, I got something resembling a layout.

....argh the more I think about the layout the less I like it. It's horrible, really. Every decision that went into that unnatural Frankenstein's patchwork comic was a bad idea. The pics are small again, over half the page is left blank, I can't be arsed to remove the logo from every single comic (and it's intertwined with the art in many of them, so no automatic "crop top 20 px" scripts), so all in all it's not a pretty sight. The only way this comic would ever look good in print is if it were printed on a very very long vertical scroll. All the comics are 600 pixels wide, true. But every one is a different height, and you can't arrange them all on something as mundane and constricting as a standard page without a lot of cutting and pasting and rearranging, but then you lose the rhythm and all the carefully placed beat panels and page breaks just go to waste. The only way to have them not look like crap, and have any semblance of order and flow is to stack them all on top of each other and print them on one continuous strip of paper, fifteen centimeters wide and several miles long.

[/rant]


Ugh. Anyway. FAST, thanks again for the suggestions, I'll need them for the next book Chapter two lies ahead.