Duplicate PDF pages without blowing up the file size

pdfpreview

I have a PDF document with one page, containing a large image and some text. I need to add some other PDF documents and duplicate the page with the image 60 times, resulting in a final 70-page document for a professional printer. I've used Preview to do this, but it resulted in a huge file size because the image was always copied.
Is there any way (app, command line) short of Adobe Acrobat (too pricey) to duplicate a pdf page while just referencing the image?

Best Answer

You can duplicate pages in preview by opening up the sidebar to display thumbnails (View->Thumbnails), click on the page you want to duplicate, and then hold down Option and drag the thumbnail to the new location. That will create a duplicate of the page and leave it at the new location. When you do it this way, it does NOT duplicate the internal images and assets, but will reference them on the new page. I just confirmed with a one-page PDF which had a 400k scanned image: I turned it into a 6-page document which was still around 400k.

If you instead add the page you wish to duplicate with Edit->Insert->Page From File... it loads all the assets again and does not reference the ones you'd already loaded, causing the file size to balloon. It would certainly be nice if it could recognize that the assets are the same, but alas.