Fix PDF margins for two-sided printing

pdf

I have a free PDF book on which every page has a very large margin on the right-side. I would like to print it two-sided and bind it to a book using an online printing service. The problem is that I would need to move the content of each odd numbered page to the right for this to work better.

I don't have access to the TeX source that generated the file and the authors are not providing it, so I can't recompile it for two-sided printing. I'm happy with any solution that works on either Linux or OS X.

For anyone interested, the file is this: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/book.pdf

EDIT: After some tinkering I did it with the following method:

I first split the pdf into two files of odd/even pages using pdftk.
Using Skim I measured the size of the left margin which was 72pts.
Using Skim's select tool, I picked a 72pt margin on the left for the odd pages and on the right for the even pages with a total width of 450 points. To keep A4 proportions, I chose 636 pts as the height of the bounding box and made it fit the document. Finally, I cropped the even/odd files to their corresponding boxes.
Merged the files using pdftk.
Open the file in OS X Preview, opened the print dialog, chose save as PDF, chose A4 as paper size and scale to fit the page.

Had been nicer to do this from the command line, since using a calculator to calculate the coordinates is much quicker than trying to get the bounding boxes with the correct coordinates. From some reason Skim doesn't show you the coordinates of the cursor in the status bar before you have chosen the first point for the selection.

Best Answer

Method #1 - pdfcrop

There's a command line tool called pdfcrop that sounds like what you're looking for.

pdfcrop is a utility to calculate and remove empty margins from each page in the input PDF file. The resulting output file occupies the minimal paper size needed for the contents and is therefore suitable for inclusion as a graphic

Examples

$ pdfcrop --margins 10 input.pdf output.pdf
$ pdfcrop --margins ’5 10 5 20’ --clip input.pdf output.pdf

Method #2 - pdfjam

As an alternative there's another tool called pdfjam.

$ pdfjam --twoside --offset '2cm 0cm' file.pdf

References

Related Solutions

Shell – Split pages in pdf

Here's a small Python script using the old PyPdf library that does the job neatly. Save it in a script called un2up (or whatever you like), make it executable (chmod +x un2up), and run it as a filter (un2up <2up.pdf >1up.pdf).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import copy, sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
input = PdfFileReader(sys.stdin)
output = PdfFileWriter()
for p in [input.getPage(i) for i in range(0,input.getNumPages())]:
    q = copy.copy(p)
    (w, h) = p.mediaBox.upperRight
    p.mediaBox.upperRight = (w/2, h)
    q.mediaBox.upperLeft = (w/2, h)
    output.addPage(p)
    output.addPage(q)
output.write(sys.stdout)

_{Ignore any deprecation warnings; only the PyPdf maintainers need be concerned with those.}

If the input is oriented in an unusual way, you may need to use different coordinates when truncating the pages. See Why my code not correctly split every page in a scanned pdf?

Just in case it's useful, here's my earlier answer which uses a combination of two tools plus some manual intervention:

Pdfjam (at least version 2.0), based on the pdfpages LaTeX package, to crop the pages;
Pdftk, to put the left and right halves back together.

Both tools are needed because as far as I can tell pdfpages isn't able to apply two different transformations to the same page in one stream. In the call to pdftk, replace 42 by the number of pages in the input document (2up.pdf).

pdfjam -o odd.pdf --trim '0cm 0cm 14.85cm 0cm' --scale 1.141 2up.pdf
pdfjam -o even.pdf --trim '14.85cm 0cm 0cm 0cm' --scale 1.141 2up.pdf
pdftk O=odd.pdf E=even.pdf cat $(i=1; while [ $i -le 42 ]; do echo O$i E$i; i=$(($i+1)); done) output all.pdf

In case you don't have pdfjam 2.0, it's enough to have a PDFLaTeX installation with the pdfpages package (on Ubuntu: you need texlive-latex-recommended and perhaps (on Ubuntu: texlive-fonts-recommended ), and use the following driver file driver.tex:

\batchmode
\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdfmerge[trim=0cm 0cm 14.85cm 0cm,scale=1.141]{2up.pdf,-}
\includepdfmerge[trim=14.85cm 0cm 0cm 0cm,scale=1.141]{2up.pdf,-}
\end{document}

Then run the following commands, replacing 42 by the number of pages in the input file (which must be called 2up.pdf):

pdflatex driver
pdftk driver.pdf cat $(i=1; pages=42; while [ $i -le $pages ]; do echo $i $(($pages+$i)); i=$(($i+1)); done) output 1up.pdf

Extract even-numbered and odd-numbered pages of a PDF into two separate PDFs

I'd do it with pdftk.

pdftk A=all.pdf cat Aodd output odd.pdf
pdftk A=all.pdf cat Aeven output even.pdf