I have a set of documents that are designed as 4 8.5x11 (portrait) pages, but will be printed
as two-up double-sided 17x11 (landscape) paper sheets.

How is this best done?
Can I just treat them as 8.5x11 pages and do something in the pdf document properties?
Or is there some fancy CSS3 way to do this?
Or will i have to do something ugly like wrap my 4 pages in some fixed size html table?

If you are printing the documents, you can just select the options in the print dialog in Acrobat.

this is going to be a large pdf file with hundreds of pages submitted to a print service.
no acrobat (or desktops for that matter) in the picture.
but perhaps there are some document-level properties in the pdf i can hack with a command-line pdf tool after generating?

There is a "Duplex" field in the PDF ViewerPreferences dictionary that Prince currently does not set. It can be set as "Simplex", "DuplexFlipShortEdge", or "DuplexFlipLongEdge". Perhaps one of these would help?

Ah. I just studied a working example supplied from the vendor, and they actually have it set to "Simplex", even though they print duplex. So clearly they don't care, and have some other configuration they do in their workflow.

So that settles the two-sided (aka duplex) part of the question, at least for my immediate concerns.

What about the question of dealing with input html files that are 8.5x11 (portrait), and getting them into a
a side-by-side layout in a 17x11 (landscape) pdf document?

Prince can't do this, but perhaps the pdfnup tool can?

wow, pdfnup looks like the perfect tool for this, thanks.

i'm kind of surprised there is nothing buried in the css standards for this.
But I must admit what i'm thinking of is internally inconsistent: I want to use @page css for the
individual 8.5x11 pages, but I *also* want them put out in a larger "page".

-mda

It's something we could add to Prince one day, but the existence of external tools and the number of other features on our roadmap means we haven't done it yet.

If a printer asked me to do the imposition myself, I'd find another printer

We have print runs that may be close to a million copies, and we just send them the PDF that comes straight out of Prince, with one "page" per page. Imposition is so complex, and so dependent on individual circumstances, that it would be very hard to come up with a standard, let alone implement it.

Dave

dauwhe - perhaps you could send a private note to mda atsign discerning.com about your print vendor?
we are thinking of moving away from ours for a variety of reasons.
(unless of course you don't mind recommending them on the forum).

I work for one of the big five trade publishers in the U.S. Most of our books are printed by R.R. Donnelley.

I have done some imposition by hand, which is why I so strongly recommend against it! I have had success using the Acrobat plugin "Quite Imposing". http://www.quite.com/imposing/

Dave