Printable A5 booklet on A4 sheets from A5 pages using psutils, pstops and CUPS

First off is seems a bit strange that you'd go from page 2 to page 5 of a document but you probably have your reasons. It might be easier to change the page arrangement of the original document rather than doing fancy printing. But it does look like you have several options.

To print an 8 page document the way you want to, you could use the following printing order for a booklet print: 1,2,5,6,7,8,3,4 => (4,1) (2,3) (8,5) (6,7)

As you can see you'd not be using ranges but rather individual pages. If you look at what actually happens you'd be stacking your page pairs from the outside to the inside and reverse the order for every front page. In the following example FP stands for front page and BP for back page:

• FP 1 (4,1) => 1 , 4
• BP 1 (2,3) => 1,2 , 3,4
• FP 2 (8,5) => 1,2,5 , 8,3,4
• BP 2 (6,7) => 1,2,5,6 , 7,8,3,4

If you want to take this route, you might be able to prepare a string for your usual document length and for shorter documents you might be able to just cut out some of it.

An alternative approach, that is similar but might give you less of a headache, is to use the "Multiple Pages Per Sheet" option in which case you'd just name the pairs in the order you want them printed. So you'd not have to change the order for your front pages and would just name them in the order you want. So for the 8 page example it would be: 4,1,2,3,8,5,6,7

Again you could see a pattern here. Divide the number of pages by the number of sheets and move the last number of the range to the front of it.

• 8/2 => 1-4,5-8
• (1-4) (5-8) => 4,1-3 , 8,5-7

If carefully look at it the booklet option the page pairs are the same but building the string is more complex.

An example for 16 pages:

To get the pairs we're going to use the second option because we need them anyway for the booklet option.

• 16/4 => 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16
• (1-4) (5-8) (9-12) (13-16) => 4,1-3 , 8,5-7 , 12,9-11 , 16,13-15

The booklet transformation would look like the following.

• FP 1 (4,1) => 1 , 4
• BP 1 (2,3) => 1,2 , 3,4
• FP 2 (8,5) => 1,2,5 , 8,3,4
• BP 2 (6,7) => 1,2,5,6 , 7,8,3,4
• FP 3 (12,9) => 1,2,5,6,9 , 12,7,8,3,4
• BP 3 (10,11) => 1,2,5,6,9,10 , 11,12,7,8,3,4
• FP 4 (16,13) => 1,2,5,6,9,10,13 , 16,11,12,7,8,3,4
• BP 4 (14,15) => 1,2,5,6,9,10,13,14 , 15,16,11,12,7,8,3,4

With the approach presented in this answer you will have issue if you have a number of pages that is not divisible by 4 without a remainder. If you do have a remainder like with your 78 page document (78/4 => 19,5) you will end up with some empty pages in the middle of your document. You might be able to write a simple script to generate the order of pages. For the "Multiple Pages Per Sheet" option it might look like this in PowerShell:

$pageNumbers = @(1..16)
$numberOfPages = $pageNumbers.length/4
$i = 0;

while($i -lt $pageNumbers.length){
    $lastPage = $pageNumbers[$i+$numberOfPages-1];

    # Shift all the numbers by one to the right
    for($j = $i+$numberOfPages-1; $j -gt $i; $j--){
        $pageNumbers[$j] = $pageNumbers[$j-1];
    }

    $pageNumbers[$i] = $lastPage;
    $i += $numberOfPages;
}

Write-Output ($pageNumbers -join ',')