How to resize my pdf?

[bthoven]

I have a rasterized pdf (scanned image) which size is too big.

I wish to scale the size down (its size is 6.97"x4.09", want to scale down to 4.5" high).

Any freeware allows me to do this?

[WillAdams]

Any bitmap editor which supports the import of .pdfs should allow you to do this, GIMP is one free program which will (use GhostScript to) import .pdfs.

William

[TGS]

The other option is to get the text out of the PDF with an OCR programme - Abbyy FineReader is good. Once you've got the text you can do what you want with it - resize it, reflow it - in a word processing programme and then print to PDF again.

[frabjous]

I'm curious exactly why you want to do this. Just about every PDF reader, certainly on portable devices, will automatically scale the PDF to match the size of the screen.

Is this for the purpose of printing, or ...?

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Any bitmap editor which supports the import of .pdfs should allow you to do this, GIMP is one free program which will (use GhostScript to) import .pdfs.

William

Thanks. As there are around two hundred pages, GIMP will import them into layers of images. My questions are:

1. After editing in GIMP, which format should I save them? save in layers? because I can't save them as pdf direct from GIMP.
2. How to convert it back to multi-page pdf?

Thanks

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by frabjous

I'm curious exactly why you want to do this. Just about every PDF reader, certainly on portable devices, will automatically scale the PDF to match the size of the screen.

Is this for the purpose of printing, or ...?

Hi,

As the document page is too long, when autofit in Nook, the text is too small with lot of blank space on the right. I wish I can compress the height of the page a bit; or to make the page height vs width scale fit my Nook. This should make the text look bigger on my Nook.

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by TGS

The other option is to get the text out of the PDF with an OCR programme - Abbyy FineReader is good. Once you've got the text you can do what you want with it - resize it, reflow it - in a word processing programme and then print to PDF again.

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion. The document looks quite dirty because it was scanned from a very old book. The text is also in Thai which current local OCR software is still not good enough to produce accurate text out of it.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by bthoven

As the document page is too long, when autofit in Nook, the text is too small with lot of blank space on the right. I wish I can compress the height of the page a bit; or to make the page height vs width scale fit my Nook. This should make the text look bigger on my Nook.

Scaling the page will not help with this problem. It shows the whitespace because the proportions (height/width ratio) of the page do not match that of the nook. Resizing the page while keeping the same proportions will do exactly nothing. There isn't that much you can do about that, but the best thing to do would be to trim the whitespace, i.e., crop the PDF, not resize it. Ignore all the instructions above.

There are some instructions in this thread for cropping scanned PDFs.

You could also try soPDF or PaperCrop or PDFread.

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Scaling the page will not help with this problem. It shows the whitespace because the proportions (height/width ratio) of the page do not match that of the nook. Resizing the page while keeping the same proportions will do exactly nothing. There isn't that much you can do about that, but the best thing to do would be to trim the whitespace, i.e., crop the PDF, not resize it. Ignore all the instructions above.

There are some instructions in this thread for cropping scanned PDFs.

You could also try soPDF or PaperCrop or PDFread.

Yes..that's what I intend to do. There is no white margins at all in the document, each page is just too long. I have to change the proportion of the pages to be same as my Nook width:height proportion.

I already use GIMP to import, change the proportion, and save it in gif and xcf as layered image file. I don't know how to convert it further to pdf? The preview of the new proportion still looks good and very readable.

[frabjous]

Are you cutting the pages into proportionally correct sized chunks, or are you actually stretching the text or images disproportionately to match the Nook's size?

Hey, if it still looks good, more power to you. I would think this would usually result is something fairly awful looking, however...

Either way, I wouldn't think that the GIMP is the right tool for this job. (Although I am a big fan of the GIMP in general.)

For cutting into appropriately sized chunks, one thing could you try is processing with PDFLRF and then use calibre to convert the resultant LRF to something Nook can read (ePub or whatever).

For stretching, I'd probably bypass the GIMP altogether and write a script for ImageMagick that does it all automatically. (E.g., burst a PDF into multiple images, batch resize the pages, etc.) ImageMagick can also convert multiple images, or a multi-layer image, into a multipage PDF.

E.g.:

convert *.gif -adjoin output.pdf

Will combine all the .gifs in the directory into output.pdf.

if I knew a bit more about exactly what the workflow is, I might be able to help with the script, though I'm by no means an expert.

[bthoven]

Thanks frabjous...you're very helpful.

I use gimp to stretch (should say squeeze) the image and now saved as multi-layer gif.

It seems there is no tool to convert such a multi-layer gif file to multi-page pdf.

[frabjous]

ImageMagick will also convert multilayer gifs to multipage PDFs.

convert mymultilayer.gif mymultipage.pdf

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by frabjous

ImageMagick will also convert multilayer gifs to multipage PDFs.

convert mymultilayer.gif mymultipage.pdf

Thanks..it works!

The problem are:

1. size increase two folds (from 9MB to 17MB). Size increased at pdf-to-gif process by gimp. The imagemagick just increased size a bit.
2. the output file show pages in reverse order, ie. last page show first. I have to reverse layer order in gimp before using imagemagick. Is there an option in imagemagick to reverse layer order when producing pdf file?
Thanks

[frabjous]

Try:

convert mymultilayer.gif -reverse mymultipage.pdf

Not sure what can be done about the file size offhand, but I'll give it some thought.

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Try:

convert mymultilayer.gif -reverse mymultipage.pdf

Not sure what can be done about the file size offhand, but I'll give it some thought.

Thanks..that reverse option works!