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

I would like to advertise my pdftools

It's written in Python so should run on any platform. It's a wrapper to Latex (the pdfpages packages) but can do lot of things with a single command line: merge pdf files, nup them (multiple input pages per output page) and number the pages of the output file (you specify the location and the format of the number) It still needs some work but I think it's quite stable to be usable right now :)

Answer 2

I had a similar problem. I tried Impose but it was giving me an

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: tool/pdf/Impose
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: tool.pdf.Impose
(...)
Could not find the main class: tool.pdf.Impose.  Program will exit.

I then tried PDF Snake which isn't free or open source, but has a completely unrestricted 30-day trial version. It worked perfectly, after tweaking the parameters to achieve what I wanted. It's a great tool. I would definitely buy it if it wasn't so expensive! Anyway, I thought I'd leave my 2 cents in case anyone had the same problem I had with Impose.

Answer 3

look at this

http://sourceforge.net/projects/proposition/

It needs laTex to run, but when it does, works really fine

Regards

Answer 4

On the Postscript side, a tool named pstops is able to rearrange pages of a Postscript file in any way you could imagine. I've not heard of such a tool for PDF. But pdf2ps and ps2pdf exist. So a not-so-ideal solution may be a combination of pdf2ps, pstops and ps2pdf.

Answer 5

I just came across a nice tool on superuser.com called PDFjam that can do all of the above in a single command:

pdfjam --nup 2x1 file1.pdf file2.pdf --outfile DONESKI.pdf

It has other standard features like page size plus a nice syntax for more sophisticated collations of pages (the tricky page re-ordering necessary for true booklet-style page imposition).

It's built on top of TeX which is, whatever it is. Installing is a breeze on Ubuntu: you can just apt-get install pdfjam. On Mac OS, I recommend getting BasicTeX (google "mactex basictex"; SO thinks I'm a spammer and won't let me post the link).

This is a lot easier and more maintanable than installing both pdftk and Multivalent (on both Mac OS for dev and Ubuntu for deploy), which wasn't going so well for me anyway...!