I have a pdf document, and I want to print it as a booklet, i.e. two pages of the document on each side of a sheet of paper and so that (when printed) the entire thing can just be folded in the middle to create a small booklet.
How can I do this easily?
Best Answer
For a free and universal alternative you can use the
pdfbook
script, part of thepdfjam
collection which is usually included in LaTeX distributions (notably MacTeX). It's simple to use from the command line:If the above doesn't work, then
/Library/TeX/texbin
isn't in your PATH (or/usr/texbin
for older versions of MacTeX). The best course of action is to ensure PATH is correctly set (lots of command line programs will fail if the PATH variable isn't correct andpdfbook
is one of them); this isn't trivial under OS X if you want a consistent behavior between applications launched from the dock and applications run from a terminal so you definitely should search a complete solution to this specific problem. As dirty work-around, you can runexport PATH="$PATH:/Library/TeX/texbin:/usr/texbin"
every time before you usepdfbook
(including in the service below).If you don't want to use the command line, you can create a service easily.
pdfbook
, for instancepdfbook "$@"
.My complete script also creates a temporary file and opens the resulting PDF:
The most obvious problem is the several GB download and installation of a LaTeX distribution if all you want is the
pdfbook
script.