PDF adventures

My PDF adventures continue.

Like Chloé-Agathe, I too needed to create a large (30+ pages), single PDF file out of a combination of multiple other files, and page numbers – i.e., re-numbering – is really helpful. I already know of pdftk, and from her blog post – and others, I learned that this was all still possible 11 years later on macOS 27.0.1.

Step 1: Combine the 1st two pages of foo.bar, and the 9th, 10th pages of bar.pdf as baz.pdf:

pdftk A=foo.pdf B=bar.pdf cat A1-2 B9-10 output baz.pdf

After this step, baz.pdf consists of 4 pages to be re-numbered.

Note that I tried to replicate Steps 2/3 in Google Docs, and it didn’t work, so I had to install LaTeX…

Step 2: Define a LaTeX document numbers.tex:

 \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
 \usepackage{multido}
 \usepackage[hmargin=.8cm,vmargin=1.5cm,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}
 \begin{document}
 \multido{}{4}{\vphantom{x}\newpage}
 \end{document}

(4 is the total number of pages.)

Step 3: Generate numbers.pdf:

pdflatex numbers.tex

Step 4: Combine the PDFs as qux.pdf:

pdftk baz.pdf multistamp numbers.pdf output qux.pdf

Optional Step 5: Reduce filesize. My PDF was too large (13+ Mo). I used Ghostscript to reduce it by ~84%:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dQUIET -sOutputFile=quux.pdf qux.pdf

Happy PDF-ing!