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Say I start off from a PDF document, say of 12 pages, viewed with evince. To produce another PDF of 6 sheets, with a page setup of two pages per side, I normally use the "Print to File" device listed in the ^P dialogue window. This works out pretty neatly.

I would like to translate this operation for the command line.

  • To my understanding, this is not an operation that pdftk can do. Please cross check.
  • The command lp, which would accept the option -o number-up=2, does not recognize any device called "Print to File", which indeed does not show up in lpstat -p -d.
  • I am aware of the post What is “Print to File” and can it be used from command line?. I have installed cups-pdf whereby a new printer named PDF is acknowledged. However, the print quality of a simple text file is way too raw (for example, no print margins to start with). Moreover, if I reprint an existing PDF file on this device, say lp -p PDF existing.pdf, evince can't even manage to open that copycatted output, while this is not the case with the "Print to File" way.
  • I had a look at man evince. At the bottom, it touches upon a few print preview options and redirects to a GNOME-developer project page. Admittedly I am not able to make sense and use of it.

Is there actually a way to combine the flexibility of the command line with the print quality that I obtain from that "Print to File" option in the GUI evince?

My test case, again, would be to create from the command line a PDF out of a source document printed with two pages per sheet.

Thanks for thinking along.

Community
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XavierStuvw
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3 Answers3

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There is the pdfnup (or pdfjam) command line tool. You can install it from the repositories of your distribution (sudo apt-get install pdfjam for Debian-based distributions, yaourt -S pdfnup on Arch etc).

The default options will take the input PDF file and produce an output PDF with two input pages per page:

pdfnup -o output.pdf input.pdf
terdon
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pseyfert
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    This produces the desired result ahead of engaging with printing commands. Man pages are available on-line from [Linux.die.net](http://linux.die.net/man/1/pdfnup) – XavierStuvw Jan 10 '16 at 12:48
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    For `pdfjam` you need to add the option `--nup 2x1`, otherwise it just pipes the document as-is. – comfreak Oct 23 '21 at 19:29
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    Note that the pdfnup script from pdfjam is no more, you'll have to use pdfjam directly. – vonbrand Jan 17 '23 at 14:05
  • pdfjam sources: https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam and https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam-extras (pdfnup, pdfpun, pdfjoin, pdf90, pdf180, pdf270, pdfflip, pdfbook, pdfjam-pocketmod, pdfjam-slides3up, pdfjam-slides6up), pdfjam old source: [warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam](https://web.archive.org/web/20190918145150/https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/firth/software/pdfjam) – milahu Jul 28 '23 at 12:37
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To expand on the accepted answer:

Using pdfjam you will need to pass the landscape option as well. The usage is:

pdfjam input.pdf -o output.pdf --nup 2x1 --landscape

Note that the extra --angle 90 might save your day, depending on the orientation of the pages in the original PDF.

Olivier
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Lukas Bühler
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0

Yes you can print multiple pages: 

command | lpr -P <printername> -p <priority from 1 to 100>

Example of use:

ls -l | lpr -P hpprinter -p 2
Jakuje
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DnrDevil
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    Hi. This answer bumps against the limitation that, if I launch `lpr -P PDF -p 2` the quality of the result is way too raw. It is useful if that is not a requirement. – XavierStuvw Jan 10 '16 at 12:45