Hi have searched for an answer but cant find one. I have a couple of pdf books that have two pages printed on the same page and cannot convert them successfully. I cant even seperated the pages, does anyone have any idea how this can be done?
Thanks

that's a good question.
I had the issue today.
I'll try with Adobe Acrobat to see if there's an option somewhere !

that's a good question.
I had the issue today.
I'll try with Adobe Acrobat to see if there's an option somewhere !

Turn on reflow. that should make one flow with one column.

Dale

Thanks heaps for your reply, but that only allows you to read the book in a single column on the pc. You cannot save, edit, or print a document while it is in Reflow view. This means I cannot read it on my sony reader.

If I understand you correctly, you have pages similar to this;
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=54&pictureid=772

If this is the case, I know you can convert to two individual pages using the OCR program ABBYY Finereader.

Similar but not quite the same problem: Is there any software that can automatically split two-on-one pdf pages into two separate pages? Basically, I want to convert scanned PDFs from double-paged landscape layout to single-paged portrait layout.

From the list of functions in an old thread, PDFRead supposedly can do something similar, but I was curious to know if I'm understanding that correctly before I install devtools and the rest. I'd also prefer keeping it in PDF, but, skimming the PDFRead threads, all discussion seems to be about converting to another format. I suppose conversion is fine, but I hate relying on OCR to get words correct, especially with moderately grainy and small-font-size scanned PDFs.

Hi

Finereader Pro 9 (http://www.abbyy.com) and Snapter (http://www.snapter.atiz.com) can do this.

They are not free, but Finereader is one of the two leaders of the OCR market and will serve you much beyond the need you have now.

Anything on OS X? Forgot to mention that...

I’m sorry but I’m Apple “blind”, and thus can not help you here.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. If it comes down to it, I can always install Windows. That's just a little overkill for one program...

Anyone else know of any?

Hi have searched for an answer but cant find one. I have a couple of pdf books that have two pages printed on the same page and cannot convert them successfully. I cant even seperated the pages, does anyone have any idea how this can be done?
Thanks
Based on a tip on this site a couple of days ago, I picked up a free copy of PDFZilla and used it to convert a 4 column PDF in tabloid size to an MSWord doc. It handled it nicely, putting each column in separate frames, fully editable text. When it did not find the font used in the original document installed on my system it substituted with a reasonable solution. The program also converts PDF to txt or html.

cheers

For any other Mac users out there, there's a tedious way to do this with preview.

Make two copies of the original PDF.
Open one copy, select the left hand pages with the Box tool.
Make sure the "Thumbnail" view is selected in the preview bar on the right side. Select all pages in the preview bar.
You should now be able to see where the selection you want to crop falls on each page. Make sure nothing will get chopped off, then select Crop from the Tools menu, or hit Cmd-K.
Now, you'll need to "Print" the file to a new PDF. When you crop something in Preview, it doesn't actually delete the data which you cut off, just hides it (To see the cropped document in its original, uncropped form, go to "View/PDF Display/Media Box"). However, if you print it, only the area you kept will be printed.
Repeat with the right hand pages.

And here's the tedious part.
You should now have two files, one with only left hand pages and one with only right hand pages.
If you've got both windows open in Preview, with thumbnail view in the right hand preview bar, you can drag pages from the right-hand-pages file into the left-hand-pages file, interpolating all the pages. Helpful tip: It's easiest if you go to the Edit menu and insert enough blank pages so that the page numbers on the actual document match up with the page number in the PDF file. That way you can tell if you get off number or drop a page in the wrong spot.

Anyone know of a faster way to do this? I don't have any experience with Automator, but could it automate the interpolation process?

Hi

Finereader Pro 9 (http://www.abbyy.com) and Snapter (http://www.snapter.atiz.com) can do this.

They are not free, but Finereader is one of the two leaders of the OCR market and will serve you much beyond the need you have now.
Thanks for the tip. FineReader is ... well ...fine and deals very well with double-column PDF documents (among others) :thumbsup:

I did convert some PDF documents like you describe. For most of them, I managed to get some readable documents by using PaperCrop (see http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31677)

You can use Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader):

1. Choose Adobe PDF printer
2. Set Page Scaling to "Tile Large Pages", set Tile Scale to 100% and overlap to 0
3. Print the document with Adobe PDF printer as a new .pdf file

For any other Mac users out there, there's a tedious way to do this with preview.

Make two copies of the original PDF.
Open one copy, select the left hand pages with the Box tool.
Make sure the "Thumbnail" view is selected in the preview bar on the right side. Select all pages in the preview bar.
You should now be able to see where the selection you want to crop falls on each page. Make sure nothing will get chopped off, then select Crop from the Tools menu, or hit Cmd-K.
Now, you'll need to "Print" the file to a new PDF. When you crop something in Preview, it doesn't actually delete the data which you cut off, just hides it (To see the cropped document in its original, uncropped form, go to "View/PDF Display/Media Box"). However, if you print it, only the area you kept will be printed.
Repeat with the right hand pages.

And here's the tedious part.
You should now have two files, one with only left hand pages and one with only right hand pages.
If you've got both windows open in Preview, with thumbnail view in the right hand preview bar, you can drag pages from the right-hand-pages file into the left-hand-pages file, interpolating all the pages. Helpful tip: It's easiest if you go to the Edit menu and insert enough blank pages so that the page numbers on the actual document match up with the page number in the PDF file. That way you can tell if you get off number or drop a page in the wrong spot.

Anyone know of a faster way to do this? I don't have any experience with Automator, but could it automate the interpolation process?

Sorry to resuscitate the thread but I seem to have gotten stuck in this last part.

Can anyone explain me better how to interpolate the pages because my Preview simply seems not to allow me to do it.

Alternatively does anyone know how to do an automator action that would do the trick?

Sorry if that's confusing... this is one of those 'easier than it sounds' types of things.

If you've made it that far, you have on file with all of your left hand pages, and one file with all of your right hand pages.

Open the file that contains the first page (should be the left-hand-pages document, "File #1").

Make sure you have the Sidebar open ("View/Sidebar"; Cmd-Shift-D; or the "Sidebar" button in the top toolbar). In the bottom of the sidebar, there should be button with two little boxes beside two little lines. Click that, and choose "Thumbnails" from the three options. (This will ONLY WORK if you have the thumbnail view selected— I may not have made that clear enough last time.) The sidebar should now show scaled down previews of each page, laid out in a grid. (See the first attached image for how it should look.)

Now open your other file (right-hand pages, File #2) and set it up the same way, with thumbnail views. In File #2, the first page in it should be the second page of what will eventually be your finished document. Click and hold the thumbnail of the first page in File #2, then drag it over and drop it next to the thumbnail of the first page in File #1. A little red bar should appear to show where the page will be dropped. (See the 2nd attached image)

Now comes the tedious part of dragging each right hand page from File #2 to the correct place in File #1, making sure all your page numbers end up in order. Once you've done that, just Save!

Just lemme know if you need any more clarification.

Sorry if that's confusing... this is one of those 'easier than it sounds' types of things.

If you've made it that far, you have on file with all of your left hand pages, and one file with all of your right hand pages.

Open the file that contains the first page (should be the left-hand-pages document, "File #1").

Make sure you have the Sidebar open ("View/Sidebar"; Cmd-Shift-D; or the "Sidebar" button in the top toolbar). In the bottom of the sidebar, there should be button with two little boxes beside two little lines. Click that, and choose "Thumbnails" from the three options. (This will ONLY WORK if you have the thumbnail view selected— I may not have made that clear enough last time.) The sidebar should now show scaled down previews of each page, laid out in a grid. (See the first attached image for how it should look.)

Now open your other file (right-hand pages, File #2) and set it up the same way, with thumbnail views. In File #2, the first page in it should be the second page of what will eventually be your finished document. Click and hold the thumbnail of the first page in File #2, then drag it over and drop it next to the thumbnail of the first page in File #1. A little red bar should appear to show where the page will be dropped. (See the 2nd attached image)

Now comes the tedious part of dragging each right hand page from File #2 to the correct place in File #1, making sure all your page numbers end up in order. Once you've done that, just Save!

Just lemme know if you need any more clarification.

Thanks a lot but I still have the same problem! I don't have those two little boxes that you mention at the end of the Drawer. Therefore I can't move thumbnails.

It must be because I'm running Tiger and you should be running Leopard.

PDFill PDF Editor Tools allow you to do that and its free.
http://www.pdfill.com/
(it's for windows only but if you have a mac you can always use a virtualization software to run it)

First it's better to remove all pages (cover, etc.) that are not formatted in double column (you can reinsert them later).

You need then to make two copy of the resulting PDF.

Then using the crop command, in the first copy you crop the right side of all the pages, keeping only the first column.
In the second copy you keep the second column only.


After that you merge the two files, and then reorder the pages using the reorder function like this :
For a 100 pages PDF : pages 1,51,2,52, etc.
(you can use Excel & word to generate and copy/paste the list quickly)

After that you can reinsert the cover and other normally formatted pages you removed first.

Making the first conversion is a bit tedious but once you know your way around the software it's very fast as all the steps are automated.

It's also works for every double column pdf, while with some bad pdf relying on the reflow function will mess up the text.
(The reflow displays first the first paragraph of the first column, then the first paragraph of the second column, then goes back to the first, etc. :chinscratch:)

PDFill PDF Editor Tools allow you to do that and its free.
http://www.pdfill.com/
(it's for windows only but if you have a mac you can always use a virtualization software to run it)

First it's better to remove all pages (cover, etc.) that are not formatted in double column (you can reinsert them later).

You need then to make two copy of the resulting PDF.

Then using the crop command, in the first copy you crop the right side of all the pages, keeping only the first column.
In the second copy you keep the second column only.


After that you merge the two files, and then reorder the pages using the reorder function like this :
For a 100 pages PDF : pages 1,51,2,52, etc.
(you can use Excel & word to generate and copy/paste the list quickly)

After that you can reinsert the cover and other normally formatted pages you removed first.

Making the first conversion is a bit tedious but once you know your way around the software it's very fast as all the steps are automated.

It's also works for every double column pdf, while with some bad pdf relying on the reflow function will mess up the text.
(The reflow displays first the first paragraph of the first column, then the first paragraph of the second column, then goes back to the first, etc. :chinscratch:)

Does anyone know a similar program to mac?

PDFill PDF Editor Tools allow you to do that and its free.
http://www.pdfill.com/
(it's for windows only but if you have a mac you can always use a virtualization software to run it)

First it's better to remove all pages (cover, etc.) that are not formatted in double column (you can reinsert them later).

You need then to make two copy of the resulting PDF.

Then using the crop command, in the first copy you crop the right side of all the pages, keeping only the first column.
In the second copy you keep the second column only.


After that you merge the two files, and then reorder the pages using the reorder function like this :
For a 100 pages PDF : pages 1,51,2,52, etc.
(you can use Excel & word to generate and copy/paste the list quickly)

After that you can reinsert the cover and other normally formatted pages you removed first.

Making the first conversion is a bit tedious but once you know your way around the software it's very fast as all the steps are automated.

It's also works for every double column pdf, while with some bad pdf relying on the reflow function will mess up the text.
(The reflow displays first the first paragraph of the first column, then the first paragraph of the second column, then goes back to the first, etc. :chinscratch:)

Do you happen to know how to do that using PDF lab?

No I don't have a mac. You should try it, seems that this program may allow you to do the same than PDFill.

2. Set Page Scaling to "Tile Large Pages", set Tile Scale to 100% and overlap to 0

Although I don't know what this setting means, it does work. Thanks for the info.

You can use Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader):

1. Choose Adobe PDF printer
2. Set Page Scaling to "Tile Large Pages", set Tile Scale to 100% and overlap to 0
3. Print the document with Adobe PDF printer as a new .pdf file

I tried this on a windows xp laptop. Followed the directions precisely and it did not work. :help:

It must be because I'm running Tiger and you should be running Leopard.[/QUOTE]

I am running Tiger and don't have those two little boxes either.:help:

Hi,
im a mac user and i suggest you to read
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14340

If the case is to convert pdf with images, i use the GREATEST ONE
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12790
this way i convert all pdf to images with a software i downloaded from mobileread (i dont remember name) and with the manga program it converts all double page image to single page image and make a new pdf

I tried this on a windows xp laptop. Followed the directions precisely and it did not work. :help:

Try changing paper size or scaling until you see a page cut in half in the preview area on your right.

Try changing paper size or scaling until you see a page cut in half in the preview area on your right.

Thanks I will try that.

I had the same need but could not find a easy way to batch split double page PDFs. I ended writing this basic Perl script (http://snipplr.com/view/18924/split-crop-double-page-pdfs-in-two/). (Contrary to the "Tile" hack using Acrobat, it should preserve the text layer). Thought it may be useful to others ...

Thanks, i-blis. That's a great tool. Your application is so much faster than the Adobe trick. It's really good!

It'd be great to have it in .exe format so that more people could use it.

Nice hearing you found it useful.

I don't know how to convert it to a standalone binary for the Windows platform (perl2exe might be a way to go), I stick mostly to Unix-like systems.

It would be easier in my opinion to transform the script in a tiny webapp, for those who dislike the command line and / or do not have Perl installed.

I may modify the script to allow for custom cropping. If I do modify it, I'll post a link here.