Gluing (Imposition) PDF documents

Question

I have several A4 PDF documents which I would like (two into one) "glue" together into A3 format PDF document. So I will get from 2PDFs A4 a single one sided PDF A3. I have found the excellent utility PDFToolkit and some others but none of them can be used to "glue" side by side two documents.

Answer 1

A nice, powerful, open-source imposition tool is included in the PoDoFo package: http://podofo.sourceforge.net/ It works for me. Some imposition plans can be found at: http://www.av8n.com/computer/prepress/ PoDoFo can do lots of other stuff, not just imposition.

Another useful imposition tool is Bookbinder (on the quantumelephant site). It has a GUI that appeals to non-experts. It is not as flexible or powerful as PoDoFo, but it can do imposition.

pdftk is more-or-less essential to have, but it will not do imposition.

pdfjam is useless to me, because there are a wide range of valid pdf files that it cannot handle.

I've never been able to get multivalent to work, either.

Answer 2

What you want to do is imposition. There are commercial tools to impose PDFs such as ARTS crackerjack and Quite imposing but they are pretty expensive (US$500), require a copy of acrobat professional and are overkill for imposing 2 A4 pages to an A3 sheet.

Answer 3

I would combine the two A4 pages into one 2-page PDF using pdftk. Then Print to PDF using something like PrimoPDF, and tell it to print to A3 format, two pages per side.

I just tested this printing some slides from PowerPoint. It worked great. I selected A3 as my paper size in PowerPoint, and then chose to print 2 pages per side. Printed to Primo and voila, I have two A4 slides per A3.

Answer 4

This puts two landscape letter pages onto a single portrait letter sheet, to be "bound" (i.e., folded) along the top.

pdftops $1 - | 
psbook | 
pstops -w11in -h8.5in '4:1@.65(.5in,0in)+0@.65(.5in,5.5in),2U@.65(8in,5.5in)+3@.65U(8in,11in)' | 
ps2pdf - $(basename $1 .pdf).psbook.pdf

By the way, I do this often, so I'll probably submit more "answers" to this question just to keep track of successful pstops pagespecs. Let me know if this is an inappropriate use of SO.

Answer 5

You can put multiple input pages on one output page using BookletImposer.

And you can change page orders and combine multiple pdf files using PDF Mod.

With these two tools, you can do almost everything you want with pdf files (except editing their content).

Answer 6

Found the following (free and open-source) tool for doing Imposition called Impose (thanks danio for the tip). This solved my problem perfectly.

EDIT: Here is how it's done:

Use PDF Toolkit to joint two PDF files into one (two A4)

pdftk File1.pdf File2.pdf cat output OutputFile.pdf

Create from this a single page (one A3):

java -cp Multivalent.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x1 -verbose -paper-size "42.2x29.9cm" -layout "1,2" OutputFile.pdf