I have been scanning books for over 10 years now - using the traditional flat-bed scanners (not the hyper sophisticated ones they have for library archives). Thus I have had books that turn out with the two pages open before you for each page in a PDF file.
I have had my own work-around for cropping them and then converting them into single page PDFs for years using Photoshop (see below). I also discovered using Ubuntu that there is a program that specifically performs this function (but I can't recall the name at the moment - and am not at an Ubuntu machine - but see below for how you can identify that program).
So I was searching today to see if there were any programs or tricks out there others knew about for PC's or Macs (particularly PC's).
I saw this post - from three years ago - and then a few others about that old:
"Originally Posted by joeanne12 2009
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"
This comes YEARS after this thread. But I thought I'd add something - as I am currently looking for a solution for use on a PC.
So here are my two solutions (PC and Mac using Photoshop & Ubuntu - but can't recall the program name). Below that I post a few other suggestions that I discovered but have yet to try. I am going to try this in ABBY FineReader first. But there are also apparently Briss, Snapter, and PaperCrop that might work and someone offered a Perl script (if the link still works). There is also at the bottom a method using Acrobat to print to a new PDF file - which I was trying to figure out before I found these instructions. I'll give it a shot as below is a very clear description of it.
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I have been scanning my books for years. The way I had performed this reduction from the two-page scan to single pages was to create a batch process in Photoshop that divides the page 50% left and saves it - with a sequential page number and an ".l" - and then running a second batch that divides the page 50% right - and similarly saves it with an ".r"
So I get a directory of docX.001.l, docX.001.r, ... docX.n.l, docX.n.r - I then simply import the image files into Acrobat.
It takes some time - but with the batch processes (I haven't been able to create one that does both left and right with one process - but I am not that sophisticated in programming photoshop) it is fairly easy and painless. It will just take a while for a lengthy book to be split into twice as many image files and saved - and then imported into acrobat.
NOW - I am still looking to see if anyone has come up with a better way - and I am going to try ABBY FineReader. Have a copy - but never used it - will see if it can do it.
BUT I do have GOOD NEWS (Just not as complete as I wish). On the computers that I run unix (using Ubuntu) there is an application that does exactly this. Its just that I cannot remember the name. I do recall though that if you use Ubuntu's built in software installer and search for PDF - you will find it that way.
Hope this helps. I will post a new post as well so others might be able to benefit from this - or if others have new information.
Here were the other suggestions given to date - I haven't tried them yet:
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Finereader Pro 9 (
http://www.abbyy.com) and Snapter (
http://www.snapter.atiz.com) can do this.
I managed to get some readable documents by using PaperCrop (see
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31677)
laborg
Zealot
You could try BRISS (
https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ )
Old 06-28-2010, 08:46 AM #4
If you have Perl installed on your machine, you can use this script of mine.
http://snipplr.com/view/18924/split-...e-pdfs-in-two/
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