Printing two pdf on one sheet without scaling

pdf

I have a pdf document which covers half of an A4 page. Is there a way to duplicate the text/images of that document, such that I get a single page A4 document (pdf file) with twice the orginal content, one above each other? Since the original only covers half a page, no scaling should be necessary.

Best Answer

You can use a combination of pdfjam and pdftk to do this:

pdfjam --offset '0mm -148.5mm' half-a4.pdf --outfile other-a4.pdf
pdftk half-a4.pdf stamp other-a4.pdf output double.pdf

pdfjam is being used to shift the page down half a page (A4 = 297mm tall, and 297÷2=148.5). If you need to shift the other way, you'd use -110mm 0mm.

Then pdftk puts the two pages on top of each other.

Related Solutions

Combine multiple PDF files into one (arranged in a matrix)

You could use the utility program pdfnup from the pdfjam suite.

pdfnup in.pdf --nup 3x3

should output the file in-nup.pdf with the pages of in.pdf arranged in a series of pages with a 3x3 matrix from the origin pdf.

You should merge all of you pdf files in an only one, also you must want to specify a paper size for the output file, see the pdfjam docs fot the details.

Fix PDF margins for two-sided printing

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