PDF page size splitting

[sdc]

Hi

Slightly odd request: I have a PDF consisting of around 18 A3 sheets, which form a 36 page booklet. If printed double-sided on an A3 printer, they would not line up properly, as pages 1 and 2 are on the first A3 sheet, pages 3 and 4 on the second, and so on.

Is there any way that I can electronically "slice" the A3 pages in half so that I end up with a 36 page A4 document, which can then be happily printed on our A4 double-sided laser printer?

I don't have Acrobat Professional, which I believe may allow this facility, so ideally I'm looking for some freeware/shareware that will do the job.

Thanks
Stephen

[OutToLunch]

I assume you were saying that Page 1 of PDF = Pages 1 & 2 of the booklet, etc? I usually end up doing a lot of fiddling with printing order in Acrobat Reader if it's an A4 document in the wrong order - can't think of any way of splitting A3 down the middle though if it's a single 'real' page per 2 pages. I'd go for the quick and dirty way - print on A3, slice with guillotine, rearrange, copy. Will save an afternoon of IT related cursing!

[sdc]

Yes, that's what I'd set up as my backup plan... the guillotine's here, but unfortunately isn't "wide" enough for A4 page widths, so I'll have to do it at home....!

Thanks for confirming what I thought I'd end up doing this evening...

[OutToLunch]

Only other option I can think of but can't test ATM (A3 printer is in admin office, sorry) is to use the printing options in Acrobat Reader to set the page size to A4 with "No Scaling" this would print half a page with the other half chopped off. If you fiddle with the print order and orientation I reckon you could get them all out of it.. If it's a public document feel free to link so those of us with too much time on their hands can amuse themselves on a slow Friday.

[CyberNerd]

This plugin for OpenOffice will allow pdf editing:

Sun PDF Import Extension [Beta] | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

you could use it to manually move the pages around

[sdc]

Great minds, and all that...! Yes, I managed to get it to print the left hand A4 page from the A3 spread by doing exactly that. In fact, I even used a free PDF printer driver to print it back to a set of A4 PDF sheets (thinking I'd find a way of merging two PDFs easier later...). I then wanted to rotate the entire A3 PDF through 180, and then repeat this process, thus ending up with an upside-down set of A4 pages for the other sides. I found a free PDF rotating utility (someone thought of precisely this problem?!) and tried again - but kept ending up with the "original" side - as if I'd done it on the original, unrotated copy. Obviously the rotation utility didn't actually modify the document entirely, just put some form of display instructions in front (although the print preview showed that the correct thing would happen!). Confused....

Hence I'm now stuck with the print-out-and-guillotine-and-photocopy-back-to-back routine...! I'll PM you the PDF for you to play with; thanks!
Stephen

[sdc]

This plugin for OpenOffice will allow pdf editing:

Sun PDF Import Extension [Beta] | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

you could use it to manually move the pages around

Thanks - but can I physically slice a page in half with that plugin as well? Or simply reorder the existing A3 pages?

[LeMarchand]

I've used PDFSAM but I think it will only split out separate pages, not split pages in 1/2.

Similarly, PDFX Viewer may do the trick.

If the pdfs are images, you could use a PDF image extractor and then re-create the document on A4.

[CyberNerd]

Thanks - but can I physically slice a page in half with that plugin as well? Or simply reorder the existing A3 pages?

yes, I just tried it, looks like quite a good pdf editor.
It is a beta though.

[sdc]

yes, I just tried it, looks like quite a good pdf editor.
It is a beta though.

OK, I'll give it a go; thanks!

[dhicks]

Is there any way that I can electronically "slice" the A3 pages in half so that I end up with a 36 page A4 document, which can then be happily printed on our A4 double-sided laser printer?

The open source PDF Creator will actually output in a variety of formats, including TIFF or JPEG. Simply view your PDF with Adobe Viewer, "print" it to a image file with PDF Creator, then import those images into Word or whatever to re-assemble into whatever order you like. Same method also works nicely for filling in PDF forms with nicely typed text.

--
David Hicks