[plug] Converting PDF file from 2-pages in one.

[gavin chester]

2009/1/26 Mike Holland <michael.holland at gmail.com>:
>
> A well-know publisher has been selling documents in PDF format,
> with two facing book pages to each (landscape) PDF page.
> I emailed them that this was inconvenient, especially on portable devices,
> and got a reply:
>
>  We're currently going through all our content and amending to one page
>  pdfs thanks to feedback such as this.
>   We're almost through our reformatting our top 100 titles, but as I'm
>  sure you can imagine, it's a significant task.
>
> It sounds like they are manually loading each doc into the processor and
> "save as PDF" from the menus.
>  There must be an easier way! The Unix way - a small script and a filter?
> Assuming their publishing software is totally broken, are there any (Linux)
> tools that would convert such a PDF, breaking each landscape
> page into two portrait pages?
>  Would converting PDF to postscript and back be a bad idea?

As you would know the pdf code can allow an author to dictate many
things affecting the loading of the document, such as with/without
bookmarks sidebar, single page or continuous, etc. With that in mind,
is there any chance that the publisher has specified 'facing pages' in
their document creation? If so, then it's very easy using any part of
the set of pdftools in linux to split, merge and generally change the
appearance pdfs, either from the cli or with a gui, also either single
or batch mode . Alternatively, if they have created two 'pages' on one
when it's actually two 'columns' of text then I think things would be
more complicated :-( Then again, I'm sure some clever clux will come
up with an answer, depending on your answer to the 'facing pages'
issue ;-)

Gavin