Working with PDF Documents

Transforming PDF Documents for Printing

Tools

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 xxx

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.