Tool to split up double pages

[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

[templario]

Thanks, is it posible to use it in windows, and if yes how do i run the script?

Thanks and sorry for my ignorance.

Jose

[fodiator]

Sorry,
unfortunately I don't think there is way to run it under windows (ecxept you run Linux in a vmware box). But it would be possible to run it via a php script as a service on a Linux webserver.
Perhaps a friendly soul will do it.

regards
Fodiator

[ereszet]

You can use pdflrf by cacapee in windows, dos, and Ubuntu Linux to split and refine pdf, djvu or zipped png pages. The output in zipped png can be easily converted to any other format, e.g. pdf.

[nekokami]

Will this work on PDFs that are text-based as well as image based? And will it increase the size of PDFs?

[fodiator]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Will this work on PDFs that are text-based as well as image based? And will it increase the size of PDFs?

If you are mentioning my tool: yes it works on text and image based PDF's it just cutting them in half leaving the content completely unchanged. The size grows by 15% to 50% because the number of pages will be doubled.

Regards
Fodiator

[yokos]

#programs required:
#pdftk, pdftops, poster, epstopdf

These binaries have to be installed to run the shell script successfully.

[ereszet]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Will this work on PDFs that are text-based as well as image based? And will it increase the size of PDFs?

As far as pdflrf is concerned it works with text and image pdf/djvu files (and image zipped png files) and converts them to image based lrf (Sony Reader format) or zipped png files. You can always OCR the png files and save the result as pdf if you wish. The program not only splits the pages and optionally changes them from portrait to horizontal (which increases the width of readable view) but also optionally fattens the fonts and removes white margins, plus offers a number of other settings.

I use pdflrf for converting my input files to beefed up images, in order to use them instead of pdfs in my 7" Archos 704 wifi. The main reason is very slow rendering of pdfs by Archos.

Another opition to split the pages in image only mode is to use unpaper. Linux version is available from the author's site. Command line version for DOS/Windows is available in a package pdfread (search in the directory where you install pdfread).

[Devlar]

If you don't have linux you can always split files with pdftk. Just cut the double sided into two files, odd.pdf and even.pdf then run:

pdftk even.pdf burst output %04d_A.pdf

pdftk odd.pdf burst output %04d_B.pdf

pdftk *_?.pdf cat output combined.pdf

It'll take your odd and even pages and put them in the right order.

[serpentium]

Originally Posted by Devlar

If you don't have linux you can always split files with pdftk. Just cut the double sided into two files, odd.pdf and even.pdf then run:

how can i split double image pages in two pdf pages?

[serpentium]

Originally Posted by yokos

#programs required:
#pdftk, pdftops, poster, epstopdf

These binaries have to be installed to run the shell script successfully.

im mac user: i cannot find poster and epstopdf. Where or which package i have to look for?

[fodiator]

Originally Posted by serpentium

im mac user: i cannot find poster and epstopdf. Where or which package i have to look for?

Hi,
poster could be downloaded from ftp://ftp.ics.ele.tue.nl/pub/users/j.../poster.tar.gz
epstopdf should be part of the LaTex packages (unfortunately i can't give you any details because am not a Mac user)

Hope it helps, regards
Fodiator

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Devlar

If you don't have linux you can always split files with pdftk. Just cut the double sided into two files, odd.pdf and even.pdf then run:

pdftk even.pdf burst output %04d_A.pdf

pdftk odd.pdf burst output %04d_B.pdf

pdftk *_?.pdf cat output combined.pdf

It'll take your odd and even pages and put them in the right order.

Thanks! There is a correction, however. I suppose this could depend on the files, but I had to do this:

pdftk odd.pdf burst output %04d_A.pdf

pdftk even.pdf burst output %04d_B.pdf

pdftk *_?.pdf cat output combined.pdf

For those who want to understand what this set of arcane commands means, you're telling pdftk to take the two pdf documents and split them into one pdf file per page. They get names like 0001_A.pdf, 0002_A.pdf, etc from the "odd" document, then 0001_B.pdf, 0002_B.pdf, etc. for the "even" document. If you list those alphabetically, the A's will come before the B's of the same number, so the "cat output" command puts them all back together in the right order. (You'll want to delete all the extra PDF documents afterwards, probably.)

As far as how to split the PDF document into A and B parts, I used Acrobat's Crop command. First I cropped to just keep the left half, and saved that as "odd.pdf", then I did the same but only kept the right half, as "even.pdf".

[rakis]

Originally Posted by serpentium

im mac user: i cannot find poster and epstopdf. Where or which package i have to look for?

You can install all of the above utilities using Fink found here

Warning: Fink is a bit Unixy, if you aren't familiar with the Terminal it might be a little difficult.

[grimborg]

Awesome! Thanks!

It'd be great if it was able to remove the empty margins --there seems to be no option for that in pdftk or poster, other than manually specifying the margins.