Tool to split up double pages

[grimborg]

Check sopdf --there is a GNU/Linux port at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=43

It also removes empty margins... sweet

[ubuntu21]

Originally Posted by fodiator

Hi,
I've just have received my Iliad and really like it. Unfortunately some of my PDFs are multipaged (2 portait formatted pages on one landscape page), like the Linux pnup tool is generating.
...
Find my bash script attached.

Hope you find it useful
Regards
Fodiator

The script behind "unpnup.gz" given in the first message of this topic works well on my Ubuntu 10.04 32bit, except a minor change, namely I had to edit the file and replace the line

pdftk "$1" burst

with

pdftk ../"$1" burst

Otherwise it all works well and smoothly.

[dedachan]

FOR MAC USERS:

So far, the best I've come up with is to highlight the thumbnais that appear in the Preview application and then combine the even and left sides with the Alternate Mix function on pdfsam. This way, I don't have to crop the pages individually.

Here's how I did it (it's much simpler than it looks once you try it):

For clarity, pages refers to the pages of the PDF file, and sides to the ones of the original scanned text.

1. Create two copies of the pdf file and add EVEN and ODD to their names.

2. Open the EVEN file with the Preview applicaton. On the right, there should be a row of thumbnails for all the pages. Click and drag until you have highlighted all of them. If you don't see the thumbnails, press SHIFT+Command+D. This will make the side bar appear.

If the pages are flipped the wrong way, you can press command+L or command+R to turn them either left or right. If all thumbnails are selected, this will work for all pages simultaneously. If not, it will work on individual pages.

3. With the thumbnails still highlighted, use command+3 and select the even side of your first page. Even though you are only doing this to the first page, it will actually work for all even sides on all the pages of your file. The part you want to preserve should be INSIDE the selected area.

4. Press command+K to crop the page. You should now have a document wich contains all of the even pages.

5. Save (or Save As, if you skipped the 1st step... and change the name! You don't want to accidentally overwrite your original file).

6. Repeat process with your ODD file, only select the odd sides this time.

7. Open pdfsam (it's free to download), go to Alternate Mix, and drag the ODD and EVEN files below where it says File Name. Make sure the file that has the FIRST page is listed before the other one (there are move up/move down buttons on the right corner).

8. In the Mix Options, make sure Reverse first document and Reverse second document are both unchecked. Where it says "Number of pages to switch... ", there should be the number 1 (for both).

9. Chose your destination folder and name your file (again, make sure not to overwrite your original pdf), then press the run button to generate the new PDF.

Hope this was helpful.

[jennyChrist81]

Hi,
To make the pdf files smaller is to split the PDF files into small number of files, i.e select the page from the large PDF file and split the selected
page into new PDF file.
To split the large PDF files you should go for a third party tool like PDF split tool. This tool works for large PDF files and split the PDF files into small
PDF files by giving page range as the input to the tool and output will be the PDF file containing the selected page range. There are n number of PDF split
tools in the market, but i can suggest you a best PDF tool which i choose from the bundle of the PDF split tools.I use this tool oftenly and my friends and colleagues also use this tool in there daily routine.They are very please from this tool.
You can use SysInfoTools PDF Split. Try this tool and you will surely satisfy with its features and will surely be able to make your pdf files
smaller.

http://www.sysinfotools.com/recovery/pdf-split.html

[Gurvan]

Originally Posted by dedachan

FOR MAC USERS:

.../...

Hope this was helpful.

Sorry for that little bit of "Threadomancy" but that advice from Dedachan was right on the money for me ! It works, takes only a little bit of work and gives good results ! That made my day !

Thank you very much for it !

[catharsis]

I'm using Briss - http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ and it's perfect for scanned books. The only thing it misses si to straighten the pages and some intelligent auto-crop. Is there anything better than Briss?

[Gurvan]

Briss might work fine... I don't know that for sure because it is too complicated to use for me... The method that was explained Dedachan works fine for a newbie like me.

Let me just explain what I mean by that :

Even though I started using and programming computers in the early 80s, those past years I have reverted to being a "simple user". I have stopped being a programmer about 10-15 years ago and have switched to other kind of jobs...
Thus, I am not especially interested in making the effort to learn again how to use and set up a program using command line interface and such-like. And what I remember from my Unix years would probably fit on a stamp !

Briss is still at that level where being able to understand achangelog and a readme file is necessary. And frankly, even though it might be worth the effort, using the method described by Dedachan is easier for "born again beginners" like me... Thus is what I will be using until Briss comes with a glossy GUI !

This is by no mean an adversary judgement on Briss and I do have the same problem with certain kinds of Perl programs for other uses (Anybody is thinking of DRM ? ), but I am just at a stage of my life where I'd rather spend my time reading books than "how-to's"...

So, please, let the GUI roll in !

[martienne]

I couldn't get that to work and I am on Windows 7.

But this worked for me:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...35#post1177935

[dedachan]

Glad to be of help :-)

[Shuffle]

Originally Posted by fodiator

Hi,
I've just have received my Iliad and really like it. Unfortunately some of my PDFs are multipaged (2 portait formatted pages on one landscape page), like the Linux pnup tool is generating.

I have looked around but have not found any working tool to reformat these files to be readable properly on the Iliad.

So I did some testing on my Linux PC and wrote a little shell script to unpnup such PDFs. It works perfect with my A4 Landscape PDFs but should be easily adapted to unpnup even multicolumn pages.
Find my bash script attached.

Hope you find it useful
Regards
Fodiator

Sorry to boring you, but I'm a linux newbe, I'm using ubuntu 10,10, what I did:

download your script

open the script read and download the programs that are asking for, some of then are not in the Program Center, and I go to apt-get install and didn't find, so I download then in .gz format in http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages....
they are in .gz format, so I descompact it

use the command chmod +x scriptname in all of the programs that I download, and tested with ./program name

but when I use ./unpnup.gz I still have this error message;

./unpnup Romantismo.pdf
Romantismo.pdf not found as file or resource.
Error: Failed to open PDF file:
Romantismo.pdf
Done. Input errors, so no output created.
Error: Couldn't open file 'pg*.pdf': No such file or directory.
Using default whitemargin of 0
poster: fail to open file 'pg*.eps'!
==> Warning: BoundingBox not found


If anyone could help me. Thank you all of you! And sorry for my question and my english (I'm from Brazil)

[Gwaihir]

The above needs Romantismo.pdf to be in the same, current folder as unpnup. Most likely it is not. Try with the full path to the file, so something like: ./unpnup /home/Shuffle/ebooks/Romantismo.pdf . Also note that linux is case sensitve: Romantismo.pdf is not the same file as romantismo.pdf.

[dropcactus]

Thanks "fodiator" for your contribution.
I agree with user "ubuntu21" about that little mistake. I 've fixed it by copying the file to split into tmp folder:

mkdir tmp
cp "$1" tmp/ <---my modification after line 26 of the program
cd tmp
pdftk "$1" burst

It is also very important to check that you have all the programs required [ pdftk, pdftops, poster, epstopdf] installed in your linux box (deep search in Synaptic or Aptitude to be sure).

I did it in this machine: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - Lucid Lynx (pretty outdated nowadays).

Your script works great splitting pages in landscape A4. After using your program I managed to print the copies in "booklet" style with Adobe Acrobat. The results are great and I couldn't have done it without the help of this forum.

[defrink]

It would nice if the script was modified to error and quit if either

mkdir tmp
cd tmp

fails. As written, if the current directory has a file named tmp, the mkdir silently fails, the cd fails, and the script proceeds with an eventual call to rm *.

I recommend at least changing

mkdir tmp
cd tmp

to

mkdir tmp || exit 1
cd tmp || exit 2