I have several A4 PDF documents which I would like (two into one) "glue" together into A3 format PDF document. So I will get from 2PDFs A4 a single one sided PDF A3. I have found the excellent utility PDFToolkit and some others but none of them can be used to "glue" side by side two documents.
I just came across a nice tool on superuser.com called PDFjam that can do all of the above in a single command:
pdfjam --nup 2x1 file1.pdf file2.pdf --outfile DONESKI.pdf
It has other standard features like page size plus a nice syntax for more sophisticated collations of pages (the tricky page re-ordering necessary for true booklet-style page imposition).
It's built on top of TeX which is, whatever it is. Installing is a breeze on Ubuntu: you can just apt-get install pdfjam. On Mac OS, I recommend getting BasicTeX (google "mactex basictex"; SO thinks I'm a spammer and won't let me post the link).
This is a lot easier and more maintanable than installing both pdftk and Multivalent (on both Mac OS for dev and Ubuntu for deploy), which wasn't going so well for me anyway...!
Found the following (free and open-source) tool for doing Imposition called Impose (thanks danio for the tip). This solved my problem perfectly.
EDIT: Here is how it's done:
Use PDF Toolkit to joint two PDF files into one (two A4)
pdftk File1.pdf File2.pdf cat output OutputFile.pdf
Create from this a single page (one A3):
java -cp Multivalent.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x1 -verbose -paper-size "42.2x29.9cm" -layout "1,2" OutputFile.pdf
A nice, powerful, open-source imposition tool is included in the PoDoFo package: http://podofo.sourceforge.net/ It works for me. Some imposition plans can be found at: http://www.av8n.com/computer/prepress/ PoDoFo can do lots of other stuff, not just imposition.
Another useful imposition tool is Bookbinder (on the quantumelephant site). It has a GUI that appeals to non-experts. It is not as flexible or powerful as PoDoFo, but it can do imposition.
pdftk is more-or-less essential to have, but it will not do imposition.
pdfjam is useless to me, because there are a wide range of valid pdf files that it cannot handle.
I've never been able to get multivalent to work, either.
I would like to advertise my pdftools
It's written in Python so should run on any platform. It's a wrapper to Latex (the pdfpages packages) but can do lot of things with a single command line: merge pdf files, nup them (multiple input pages per output page) and number the pages of the output file (you specify the location and the format of the number) It still needs some work but I think it's quite stable to be usable right now :)
This puts two landscape letter pages onto a single portrait letter sheet, to be "bound" (i.e., folded) along the top.
pdftops $1 - |
psbook |
pstops -w11in -h8.5in '4:1@.65(.5in,0in)+0@.65(.5in,5.5in),2U@.65(8in,5.5in)+3@.65U(8in,11in)' |
ps2pdf - $(basename $1 .pdf).psbook.pdf
By the way, I do this often, so I'll probably submit more "answers" to this question just to keep track of successful pstops pagespecs. Let me know if this is an inappropriate use of SO.
What you want to do is imposition. There are commercial tools to impose PDFs such as ARTS crackerjack and Quite imposing but they are pretty expensive (US$500), require a copy of acrobat professional and are overkill for imposing 2 A4 pages to an A3 sheet.
On the Postscript side, a tool named pstops is able to rearrange pages of a Postscript file in any way you could imagine. I've not heard of such a tool for PDF. But pdf2ps and ps2pdf exist. So a not-so-ideal solution may be a combination of pdf2ps, pstops and ps2pdf.
I would combine the two A4 pages into one 2-page PDF using pdftk. Then Print to PDF using something like PrimoPDF, and tell it to print to A3 format, two pages per side.
I just tested this printing some slides from PowerPoint. It worked great. I selected A3 as my paper size in PowerPoint, and then chose to print 2 pages per side. Printed to Primo and voila, I have two A4 slides per A3.
You can put multiple input pages on one output page using BookletImposer.
And you can change page orders and combine multiple pdf files using PDF Mod.
With these two tools, you can do almost everything you want with pdf files (except editing their content).
I had a similar problem. I tried Impose but it was giving me an
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: tool/pdf/Impose
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: tool.pdf.Impose
(...)
Could not find the main class: tool.pdf.Impose. Program will exit.
I then tried PDF Snake which isn't free or open source, but has a completely unrestricted 30-day trial version. It worked perfectly, after tweaking the parameters to achieve what I wanted. It's a great tool. I would definitely buy it if it wasn't so expensive! Anyway, I thought I'd leave my 2 cents in case anyone had the same problem I had with Impose.
look at this
http://sourceforge.net/projects/proposition/
It needs laTex to run, but when it does, works really fine
Regards
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/465271/gluing-imposition-pdf-documents