Gluing (Imposition) PDF documents

Question

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 si

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 :)

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

look at this

http://sourceforge.net/projects/proposition/

It needs laTex to run, but when it does, works really fine

Regards