PDF – Printing Two Pages Per Sheet from Command Line

.lpcupsevincepdfpdftk

Say I start off from a PDF document, say of 12 pages, viewed with evince.
To produce another PDF of 6 sheets, with a page setup of two pages per side,
I normally use the "Print to File" device listed in the ^P dialogue window.
This works out pretty neatly.

I would like to translate this operation for the command line.

To my understanding, this is not an operation that pdftk can do. Please cross check.
The command lp, which would accept the option -o number-up=2, does not recognize any device called "Print to File", which indeed does not show up in lpstat -p -d.
I am aware of the post What is “Print to File” and can it be used from command line?. I have installed cups-pdf whereby a new printer named PDF is acknowledged. However, the print quality of a simple text file is way too raw (for example, no print margins to start with). Moreover, if I reprint an existing PDF file on this device, say lp -p PDF existing.pdf, evince can't even manage to open that copycatted output, while this is not the case with the "Print to File" way.
I had a look at man evince. At the bottom, it touches upon a few print preview options and redirects to a GNOME-developer project page. Admittedly I am not able to make sense and use of it.

Is there actually a way to combine the flexibility of the command line with the print quality that I obtain from that "Print to File" option in the GUI evince?

My test case, again, would be to create from the command line a PDF out of a source document printed with two pages per sheet.

Thanks for thinking along.

Best Answer

There is the pdfnup (or pdfjam) command line tool. You can install it from the repositories of your distribution (sudo apt-get install pdfjam for Debian-based distributions, yaourt -S pdfnup on Arch etc).

The default options will take the input PDF file and produce an output PDF with two input pages per page:

pdfnup -o output.pdf input.pdf

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

How to convert a scanned PDF with OCRed text to one without OCRed text

Here is how I would remove the OCR-ed text should I have to...

First, you need to know, that OCR-ed text in a PDF is not a layer, but a special text rendering mode. The following screenshot from the official PDF specification lists all available text rendering modes:

For more background, please see these answers of mine on StackOverflow:

Now for the procedure I envisage:

0. Make a backup of your original PDF file

'nuff said...

1. Use `qpdf` to un-compress most of the PDF objects

qpdf is a beautiful command line tool to transform most PDFs into a form that makes it easier to manipulate through a text editor (or through sed):

qpdf                       \
  --qdf                    \
  --object-streams=disable \
    input.pdf              \
    editable.pdf

2. Search for spots where PDF code contains `3 Tr`

All spots in the editable.pdf where there is 'invisible' (a.k.a. neither filled nor stroked) text is marked by an initial definition of

3 Tr

Change these to now read

1 Tr

This should make the previously hidden text visible. Glyphs will appear in thick outlines, overlaying the original scanned page images.

It will look very ugly.

Save the edited PDF.

3. Change `Tj` and `TJ` text stroking operators to 'no-ops'

Whenever a text string is prepared for being rendered, the actual operator that is responsible for doing so is named Tj or TJ.

Look out for all of these. Replace them by tJ and tj. This will change them into 'no-ops': they have no meaning at all in the PDF source code; no PDF viewer or processor will "understand" them. (Be careful not to change the number of bytes when replacing stuff in PDF source code, because otherwise you may cause it to become "corrupted".)

Save the PDF file.

4. Check how the PDF file looks now

The PDF should now look "clean" again. The renamed text operators do not have any meaning any more for the PDF viewer, nor for any PDF interpreter.

5. Use Ghostscript to create the final PDF

This command should achieve what you want:

gs                        \
  -o final.pdf            \
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite       \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
   editable.pdf

This final step uses editable.pdf as input. It outputs final.pdf. The output will have removed all traces of text. The input still had the text, albeit in an "unusable" form, because the operator renaming. Since Ghostscript does not "understand" the re-named operators, it will simply skip them by default.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Fix PDF margins for two-sided printing