Tag Archives: pdftk

20 Jan
2014

Splitting And Combining Odd/Even Pages With Pdftk

I’m working on a fun printable project at the moment, but part way through I realised I would need to process odd and even pages of the document separately. So separately, that I split the doc into two separate ones, with odd pages in one and event pages in another – and then had to recombine them. Here’s the commands that I used, with an excellent tool called pdftk. Continue reading →
16 Dec
2013

Printing Many PDFs Per Page

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.

30 Jan
2013

Printing PDF Bookmarks List

I work with PDF a lot, and it bothers me that I can see an outline view when I open the document, but I don’t seem to be able to grab just that view. My presentations are mostly PDF and the titles and section headings show up nicely. Today I figured out how to get an outline view, so I’m putting that information here while I remember how to do it!

I used a tool called pdftk which is excellent, I’ve used it before for doing various other PDF-related things. To grab metadata such as bookmarks, use the dump-data command, like this:

pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data | grep BookmarkTitle > outline.txt

The above line takes all the bookmarks from the PDF (this was a slide deck created using powerdot and LaTeX, the section and slide titles nest appropriately), and outputs a bunch of information about the document and the various PDFs. The grep command just gets the lines containing “BookmarkTitle”, then the whole thing gets written to a file. I cleaned that up and now I have the outline of my course, so I can add timings, notes for the exercises and so on.