XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11, comp.text.pdf, alt.comp.os.windows-10
From: marion@facts.com
On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 19:13:33 +0300, Anton Shepelev wrote :
>> [?] Print book format PDF (FinePrint payware)
>
> I believe LaTeX has packages for that. I have produced PDF
> booklets from Postscrpt, with psbook and psnup. The
> incoming PostScipt was mine, from either LaTeX or GNU Troff.
Thanks for that suggestion as, in the past, I printed booklets.
Printing a booklet requires arranging both sides of the pages in a specific
order so that when the 8.5x11-inch printed sheets are folded in half, the
pages appear in the correct sequence as if they were in a booklet.
>> [x] Convert PDF to MSWord or any epub format & vice versa (Calibre)
>> [x] Edit PDF existing text (Adobe Reader commenting, Acrobat payware)
>> [x] Globally search & replace PDF text (Libre Office)
>
> PDF is meant to be a final format not meant for editing.
> Keep it so.
Understood. But sometimes you want to make minor edits when all you have is
the PDF and not the original document. This happens a lot, it turns out.
However, back to the printing of booklets, that's one thing I had trouble
finding free (as in no cost) software as printing a booklet from folded
8.5x11-inch paper is more complex than standard printing, especially when
dealing with double-sided printing and odd numbers of pages & title pages.
I'm aware of "pdfbook", but, alas, that requires Python (aurgh!, again!)
on Windows, but luckily, pdfbook should be easier to use on Linux & Mac.
Unfortunately, the "examples" provided are, um, shall we say underwhelming?
Digging a bit, I think something like this pdfbook command may work:
pdfbook input.pdf --paper letter --outfile output-booklet.pdf
Supposedly that pdfbook command will consider the number of pages in the
input.pdf to then automatically order the pages so that when folded, the
pages are in the correct order.
Can someone with Python installed test it out on a sample PDF for us?
>> [x] Extract images (PDF Exchange Viewer, PDF Shaper)
>
> SumatraPDF
Thanks for that suggestion. Googling it, apparently SumatraPDF can
*manually* copy an image which you can then paste into an image editor.
It turns out, I think, based on what I found anyway, that SumatraPDF uses
an underlying MuPDF library to extract images, so as a result of your
advice, I'll add muPDF to the line for extracting images.
While I was looking that up, I found that the free (no cost) PDF-XChange
Editor also can extract images from a PDF, so I'll add that too.
I think I'm going to have to give up on keeping it one line per item.
[x] Extract images (PDF Exchange Editor, PDF Shaper, PDFgear, poppler, muPDF)
>> [x] Reorder pages (mutool)
>> [x] Rotate pages (Acrobat Reader)
>
> pdftk of course.
Thanks for that suggestion. Checking rotate first, it seems that the
pdftoolkit rotation of 180 degrees is a great suggestion. Much appreciated.
pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endsouth output output.pdf
Looking that up, I found that mutool can also rotate, e.g., for 180 degrees
mutool convert -R 180 input.pdf output.pdf
I found out in that search that the GUIs for PDF-XChange Editor (free) and
PDF Arranger (free) can also rotate pages and save to a new PDF file.
Apparently Acrobat READER can only rotate the view, but it can't SAVE the
rotated results, so I'll remove Acrobat Reader from that rotation line.
[x] Rotate pages (pdftk, mutool, PDF-XChange Editor, PDF Arranger)
Now looking at the reordering of pages (which is really a duplicate of
inserting and deleting pages, isn't it?) the same programs can re-order
pages, but (as above) the latter two do it graphically, and pdftk is better
at it than mutool is, but all of them can reorder pages nonetheless.
For example, to flip the order of page 2 and 3 in a pdf using pdftk:
pdftk input.pdf cat 1 3 2 4-end output output.pdf
But it turned out to be difficult with mutool (possible but difficult).
So I removed muTool because it's just too complicated to reorder with it.
[x] Reorder pages (pdftk, PDF-XChange Editor, PDF Arranger)
Thanks for pointing out the omissions.
>> What are your suggestions (so that everyone benefits from
>> your knowledge)?
>
> The obvious one -- typsetting software for producing PDFs
> from text, e.g.: LaTeX, (GNU) Troff.
LaTeX seems to be what we have to fall back on when, for example, pdfbook
primarily focuses on the page reordering aspect of booklet creation
(although I'm confused since I saw mention that pdfbook is in the pdfjam
package, which can be installed within a TeX distribution so maybe it can
all be put together for everyone to easily output booket-style PDFs?).
As noted, LaTeX has sophisticated built-in features to analyze the content
of the PDF to more intelligently handle page breaks to avoid splitting
images or creating an awkward text flow.
Digging a bit into LaTeX (which I've never used myself), MiKTeX & TeX Live
seem to be free (no cost) Windows, Linux & Mac "modern" TeX distributions.
Also TeXstudio or TeXworks appear to be free (no cost) LaTeX editors.
Since the expensive cost of free (no cost) software is in the trials and
tribulations to find the best ones that work, does anyone have experience
with any of the distributions above for creating a booklet style PDF?
--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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