Resize many PDFs

Question

I have many (around 1000) multiple-page PDFs for a program I am writing.

The problem is that many of them are inconsistent about page size, even within the same document at times. Does anyone know of a way I could programmatically go through the files and resize the pages to what I want? This can be in any language.

I can accomplish this in Adobe Acrobat Pro, but there are so many that would end up taking a long, long time. The only way I can get it to resize there is to add a background from a file, and then choosing the file i want to resize.

Answer 1

Generally, PDFtk is a good fit for this kind of problems. It will let you pull everything apart, and reorder/resize/modify pages on the command line.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem and could easily solve it with PDF split and merge, a Java based toolkit for editing PDF files.

Answer 3

You can resize a PDF with a command line tool, Ghostscript.

Assuming you want to resize a PDF to 306x396 points (which would give you a quarter of a letter sized pages), do it like this:

gs                     \
 -o 306x396-points.pdf \
 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite     \
 -g3060x3960           \
 -dPDFFitPage          \
 -dUseCropBox          \
  input.pdf

Note that the -g.... dimensions are in pixels. Because Ghostscript internally computes with 720 PPI by default, these are increased by a factor of 10 as compared to the sizes in points.

For Windows, use gswin32c.exe or gswin64c.exe instead of gs.