[ale] A PDF Challenge

[Joe Steele]

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> Here's the challenge I've been given:  Take a PDF-format brochure that is
> formatted for folding and stapling down the middle (original is landscape)
> and produce a new PDF file with one brochure page per printed page.

<snip>

> I need a way to pull this off under Linux.  I have ps2pdf and xpdf, so on
> the surface of it, it seems like I need to use xpdf to print to a Postscript
> file (there's got to be a way to do that but I have yet to find it),

You can use xpdf to generate PS, but I generally prefer using pdf2ps which 
comes with ghostscript (and which is really just a short shell script for 
invoking gs).

> manipulate the PS somehow, 

That's where the fun begins.  What you want to do is within the 
capabilities of PS; it's just a little matter of writing the script to do 
it  -- rotate the axes...enlarge the scale...reposition the origin...set 
up a clipping area to hide unwanted marks...generate the page as 
normal...then repeat for each page, saving the output as a PS file.  
Needing to generate two pages from one page complicates the matter  -- 
probably handled with two passes through the file, each pass processing 
only one of the two images on the page.  Needing to get the pages in order 
complicates the matter further -- possibly handled with additional passes 
through the file until all pages are output in order.

> and then use ps2pdf to go back to PDF.  

Yup.  Or if the processing is all handled by running a single script, the 
output could be written directly as PDF.  That would be pretty impressive.

> Any suggestions on how to proceed or what to use, or is this something that
> would better be done entirely in Acrobat?

Beyond my generalities, I don't have much of anything useful to suggest.  The 
process I've described is not exactly trivial, at least for a person of my 
skills.  I've "learned" postscript enough to know what it can do, but I don't 
use it enough to where I can easily write scripts that work as intended 
without major debugging time.  (Debugging was especially frustrating when I 
was first experimenting with PS because my only way to see results was to 
print a page on a PS printer.  No telling how many forests were sacrificed.  
Oh well, at least I wasn't writing the scripts on punch cards.)

I don't have anything to offer for alternatives, either.  You mention Acrobat, 
which I've never used.  Of course, you could convert the pages to raster 
images and then cut them up, enlarge them, and convert them to PDF again, but 
that would seem rather crude.

--Joe
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