I'm trying to shrink and merge two A4 PDF pages into one A4 page so that if I had;
_____ _____
| | | |
| p1 | | p2 |
| | | |
|_____| |_____|
I would get;
_____
| p1 |
|.....|
| p2 |
|_____|
As a new PDF, with two A5 sized pages on that one page. Similar to how you might print two pages per page on paper.
I've looked into pyPDF (http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/) ReportLab (http://www.reportlab.com) but I can't seem to find how to shrink and merge like this.
Any hints?
Thanks!
pdfnup has this functionality (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfnup)#
e.g.
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
from pdfnup import generateNup
output = PdfFileWriter()
input1 = PdfFileReader(file("in.pdf", "rb"))
page1 = input1.getPage(0)
page2 = input1.getPage(1)
output.addPage(page1)
output.addPage(page2)
outputStream = file("out.pdf", "wb")
output.write(outputStream)
outputStream.close()
generateNup("out.pdf", 2)
The way I would do it (not necessarily the best way, but using tools I have available) would be to use Ghostcript's pdf2ps to convert to PostScript, then append an N-up PostScript preamble (PS is a full programming language and you can redefine builtins like "showpage" to add N-up or posterization directly to a document) and then I'd convert back with ps2pdf.
Offhand I'm not finding a published version of a PostScript N-up utility, but you can google several ones written in other languages that manipulate the PostScript document itself, such as those at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ajcd/psutils/
