Arch Linux

ezzetabi

Member

Registered: 2006-08-27

Posts: 947

making a psselect for pdf files.

I need often to print files with several pages. My printer does not print in both side of the sheet automatically, but after some tried I found a easy way to obtain it.

Print even pages in reversed order, put the sheets in the tray, print odd pages. (my printer puts the sheet in the same order that where printed, not reversed)

it is quite easy with psselect, for ps files:
psselect -r -e input.ps out_er.ps
psselect -o input.ps out_o.ps
lpr out_er.ps
#puts the sheet in the tray
lpr out_o.ps
rm out_*
nice!

But I didn't found anything similar for pdf files. Just converting the .pdf files to .ps works ALMOST always. Unfortunately sometime doing this spoils the quality.

So the question is, does exist something like psselect for pdf files?
If not, I'd like to implement one borrowing the pdfjam's (in the AUR) idea of using pdfpages package for texlive.

I just need to know, there is way to know (sh-wise or C-wise) of many pages a .pdf file is?
thanks.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: making a psselect for pdf files.

You could try manipulating the PDFs with pdftk. I made a script awhile back that did merges two PDFs scanned using a single-sided sheet feeder into the correct even-odd document.