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For concatenating presentations of the same topic I use pdftk (e. g. pdftk stones\ in\ england.pdf stones\ from\ namibia.pdf cat output nice\ stones.pdf).

Files with diferent frame sizes but same aspect ratio are just stringed together without any respect to the frame sizes.

How can I concatenate multiple *.pdf with one resulting size for all frames (in the same aspect ratio)?

Nepumuk
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3 Answers3

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This doesn't answer your question directly, but it's a possible workaround to the problem.

I had this problem when trying to combine two different PDF scans together that were scanned by different parties: PDF page sizes before and after For PDF files that allow printing, you can select the "Print to PDF" option from the printers dropdown menu and use the print dialog's scaling options to adjust the size accordingly: Print to PDF dialog window In my case, I used Foxit Reader and the "Fit to printer margins" option, which scaled the page down to 22.5% of the original size. You can configure the printer to whatever paper size you need in the properties dialog window. After the new PDFs are generated, you can concatenate the pages as you would normally.

One downside to this method is that the text will no longer be selectable/searchable (it's essentially been converted to an image). The same applies to any fillable form fields/buttons/checkboxes. This is likely not an issue if you are dealing with scanned PDF pages. If you still need the text to be selectable/searchable you can use an OCR tool to recognize the text (there are free tools available online and many paid versions of PDF viewers/editors have this feature)

Bartimaeus
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    This would be a good answer had this question been asked on [su]. However, given that this site is [unix.se] and the question itself is tagged as `pdftk`, answers should either involve this utility (or similar command-line tools that runs on a Unix-like OS). – Anthony Geoghegan Jan 30 '19 at 20:02
  • I'm more concerned about portrait and landscape formatted pages in the same document. @cnachtmann So I had to `pdftk burst` them first...? (Obviously: yes.) ... and put them together afterwards. Seems quite manually done work and therefor not really in a fashion for people knowing how to use automation. – Nepumuk Feb 08 '19 at 22:12
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I have been looking for a scriptable solution using qpdf or pdftk, but to no avail. The closest I found uses pdfjam, which is shipped with the TeXLive package (and may be so large that you do not want to install it solely for this purpose):

pdfjam --outfile out.pdf --paper a4paper in.pdf
AstroFloyd
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Suppose that you want to get all frame with the same size as stones\ from\ namibia.pdf

pdfinfo stones\ from\ namibia.pdf | grep 'Page size:' | awk '{print $3"x"$5}' | xargs -I {} convert stones\ in\ england.pdf -resize {} stones\ in\ england_resized.pdf
  • pdfinfo gets the fram size of stones\ from\ namibia.pdf
  • grep prints out only the page size info
  • awk reprints this info in the correct format
  • xargs forces convert read from the STDIN (remember that pipe redirects the STDOUT to the STDIN of the next command), where {} is replaced by what is seen in the STDIN
  • convert resizes stones\ in\ england.pdf to the frame size of stones\ from\ namibia.pdf and names the resized pdf as stones\ in\ england_resized.pdf

Finally, you just need to cat both :)

pdftk stones\ from\ namibia.pdf stones\ in\ england_resized.pdf cat output nice\ stones.pdf
Rubem Pacelli
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