Much of my work revolves around documents or slides, and I use PDF format for pretty much everything I do. In the last year or so I’ve developed a love affair with rst2pdf which means I’m doing more PDF now than ever.

This weekend I was working on a project which needed a programatically-generated PDF file to be many-slides-per-page – and for this I adopted a tool I haven’t used before: pdfjam (installed straight from apt on Ubuntu).

In fact it was pretty easy to get going with it: to print my existing PDFs at 4-per-page, I used this command:

pdfjam --landscape --nup 2x2 --a4paper -q slides.pdf -o handout.pdf

The slides themselves were already landscape so I specified the target document should also be landscape. The --nup 2x2 is the magic that prints many slides per page, and it seems like it can do various nice tricks with handouts. Running through the other arguments that I used: --a4paper for the paper size, -q to stop it from chattering (which it does by default, even when everything worked), slides.pdf was my input file and -o handout.pdf the target file to put the new layout into.

Until now I’ve mostly worked with pdftk for everything, but I couldn’t find a way to do this using it. Pdfjam is now a welcome addition to my PDF toolchain, so I thought I’d share.