PDFs are a fine thing. But sometimes we want to edit them. Mostly for printing.

Pdfjam

This command-line tool named pdfjam uses latex to edit PDFs. It should be available in the repositories of most Linux distros. There are also useful examples.

You can offset pages of a (twosided) document in order to make room for a binding, etc.:

pdfjam --twoside myfile.pdf --offset '1cm 0cm' --suffix 'offset'

This doesn’t scale, it just shifts the content.

You can even use pdfjam to produce PDFs with two pages per page:

pdfjam myfile.pdf --trim '1cm 2cm 1cm 2cm' --clip true --outfile /dev/stdout | \
pdfjam --nup 2x1 --landscape --frame true --outfile myoutput.pdf

This cuts the four sides of the document and puts two sides on one.

Getting rid of Margins

If you want to print large documents two-sided, large margins will produce small text.

Pdfcrop

On Linux (Ubuntu) there is a nice command line tool called pdfcrop. Several examples are given here.

It removes all white margins of pdfs:

pdfcrop --margins '5 10 20 30' input.pdf output.pdf

Without the --margins flag, pdfcrop would produce zero margins, which might look awkward.

Pdfscissors

There is also a nice Java tool with a GUI: pdfscissors. It shows you all pages of a document half-transparent stacked so that you can select what to cut on all pages simultaneously.

Pdftk

There is also the capable command-line tool called pdftk.