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red_trumpet
Asked: 2019-05-17 08:04:23 +0800 CST

Print two A5 pages on one A4 page with correct sizes

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I've got a PDF file, which has A5 as internal page size. This is also shown by evince:

evince screenshot

A5 is half A4, so I thought it should be possible to print two pages of this PDF on one A4 page, such that they have the correct size. But choosing to print two pages per sheet actually shrinks each page to half its size, so they end up being A6-sized. It looks like this:

small pdf

I could use the zoom option to get "acceptable" results, but this seems a bit hacky and I had to experiment to get the right size (hint: 200% is to large, not sure why though).

Is there a clean way to print this PDF on A4, preferably from the usual printing dialog?

printing pdf evince

2 Answers

  1. One way to solve this is using command line tools, as mentioned by Graham in the comments. This can be done as follows:

    pdftops DOC.pdf DOC.ps

    converts the pdf-file to a PostScript (ps) file. Then

    psnup -pa4 -Pa5 -2 DOC.ps DOC_2.ps

    creates a new PostScript file, where each A4 page contains two of the original A5 pages. After that use

    ps2pdf DOC_2.ps DOC_2.pdf

    to convert the PostScript file back to pdf.

    If necessary, after converting to ps one might also use psselect to select only a part of the pages.

    I'm still not happy that this is not possible from the standard printing dialog, so I don't consider this a real answer, but rather a bandaid.

    • 4

  2. Bookletimposer does this perfectly (and it can reorder the pages to create a booklet). It might be worth a try.

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