[pdftex] PSUtils equivalent for pdftex output.

[Tigran Aivazian]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> >>>>> "John" == John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> writes:
> 
>     > and I would prefer something that works with the output of
>     > pdftex, and not just pdflatex.
> 
> pdfpages works with the output of ANY program which is able to produce
> PDF.  It even works with files produced by buggy Adobe programs.

I think what John assumed was that pdfpages package must be included in
the original .tex sources (and therefore implies they have to be also
written in pdfLaTeX). This is NOT the case, John.

All you need is to write a trivial driver file, like this gnt-book.tex:

\documentclass[pdftex,a4paper]{book}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages={-}, signature=32, landscape]{gnt.pdf}
\end{document}

So, when the file "gnt.pdf" is ready (and produced by whatever means, 
doesn't matter). I run pdflatex gnt-book.tex and it generates a new file, 
gnt-book.pdf which contains gnt.pdf rearranged into signatures and with 
two pages combined on a single physical PDF page (for printing A5 pages on 
A4 paper).

There is a lot of interesting options in pdfpages and I am sure it can 
handle what you need. However, if you find that some useful option is 
missing, all you need is to email the author and ask for that option. The 
author is a very friendly and competent gentleman!

Btw, in the days when I was converting from PostScript to PDF my tnk.pdf 
file (Hebrew Old Testament) used to be 9M and now I generate it directly 
in pdflatex and the size has gone down to just 6.4M, so there are a lot of 
inefficiencies (unnecessary objects etc?) when using PostScript and then 
converting to PDF. I would say always generate PDF directly.

Kind regards
Tigran