Working with PDF Documents

Transforming PDF Documents for Printing

Tools

Tool to calculate the page reordering sequences

Linux: LinuxFormatPrinter (requires paket Mono)

Windows: WindowsFormatPrinter (requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2 or Mono for Windows)

Creating A5 booklets

1. Create a PDF document with a page size that is a multiple of four. (Add empty pages if necessary: in Linux use <pdfjoin>, in Windows use PDFill to join empty pages)
2. Use either the Windows (download WindowsFormatPrinter above) or the Linux version (download LinuxFormatPrinter) to calculate the page reordering sequence for booklet creation: Enter the number of pages (multiple of four) of the original PDF document, select 'A5 booklet' and 'Calculate'.
3. The next step depends on the operating system you are using:

Windows

Use PDFill (free), option 'Split or reorder PDF pages'. Paste the page-number string generated above into 'reorder' and save a PDF that has reordered pages. Then use the option 'Reformat multiple pages into one page'. Select landscape A4, set a six margin input fields to zero, select 1 row two columns and switch of the two options (borders, notes fields). The resulting PDF can be printed using the double-sided short-edge binding option.

Linux

Install the pdfjam package. It contains a command-line tool pdfnup. Use a terminal to execute a command similar to (all in one line):

 pdfnup original.pdf --pages 41,1,2,41,41,3,4,41,40,5,6,39,38,7,8,37,36,9,10,35,34,
 11,12,33,32,13,14,31,30,15,16,29,28,17,18,27,26,19,20,25,24,21,22,23 --nup 2x1 
 --orient landscape --outfile booklet.pdf

(Of course replace the pages string with the page numbers you generated above with the FormatPrinter tool)

This creates a booklet.pdf from original.pdf. booklet.pdf can be printed directly. Use short-edge binding double-sided printing.

Printing A6 booklets

• Use the prodedure for A5 booklets with the following changes:
• The number of pages of the original document must be a multiple of eight. Again use the FormatPrint tool above to calculate the page sequence of A6 booklets (4 A6 pages on an A4 page.
• In Linux when using pdfnup replace --nup 2x1 by --nup 2x2 and --orient landscape by --orient portrait
• In Windows select 'Portrait' and 2 rows and 2 columns when using PDFill's 'Reformat multiple pages into one page'.