Reuben Thomas https://rrt.sc3d.org/
A snapshot of this page is included as README.md in the distributed package. The most up-to-date version is maintained online at https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam.
- Overview
- Pre-requisites
- Documentation
- Installation
- Configuration
- Using pdfjam
- FAQ
- Reporting bugs
- Version history
The pdfjam package makes available the pdfjam shell script that provides a
simple interface to much of the functionality of the excellent
pdfpages
package (by Andreas Matthias) for LaTeX. The pdfjam script takes one
or more PDF files (and/or JPG/PNG graphics files) as input, and produces
one or more PDF files as output. It is useful for joining files together,
selecting pages, reducing several source pages onto one output page, etc., etc.
A potential drawback of pdfjam and other scripts based upon it is that any
hyperlinks in the source PDF are lost.
pdfjam is designed for Unix-like systems, including Linux and Mac OS X.
It seems that it will work also on Windows computers with a suitable
installation of Cygwin (with TeX Live
installed), but this has not been thoroughly tested.
Alternatives to pdfjam which are widely packaged in GNU/Linux distributions and other free software collections include:
- PDFtk (Java-based)
- PDFsam (Java-based)
- PSPDFUtils (Python-based, also supports PostScript files)
Those alternatives do many of the same things as pdfjam, and maybe
quite a bit more too.
The pdfjam software is made available free, under GPL version 2 (see the
file named COPYING that is included with the package).
It comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY of fitness for any purpose whatever.
Previous versions of pdfjam (before 3.02) included some other scripts too,
in addition to the pdfjam script iteslf.
Those other scripts are simple wrappers for calls to pdfjam, designed to perform
some common tasks such as joining or n-upping PDF files or to illustrate
other features; they are not very elaborate, and nor are they extensively tested.
They are probably best viewed as simple templates that can be used for
constructing more elaborate wrapper scripts as required.
Those 'wrapper' scripts are no longer maintained. I continue to make them available in a separate repository https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam-extras, in case anyone wants to see them, to use them, or to improve and maintain them independently as a separate project.
The specific wrapper scripts that were removed from the pdfjam package at version 3.02 are:
pdfnup,pdfpunpdfjoinpdf90,pdf180,pdf270pdfflippdfbookpdfjam-pocketmodpdfjam-slides3up,pdfjam-slides6up
For those scripts and for more information on them, please now see https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam-extras.
- A Unix-like operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.; possibly Cygwin)
- A working, up-to-date installation of LaTeX (including at least one of
pdflatex,lualatexorxelatex) - A working installation of the LaTeX package pdfpages (version 0.4f or later) and geometry.
With libpaper version 2 or later installed, pdfjam will be able to find your default paper size, which you can configure if desired.
For some years now, pdfjam has been included in the TeX Live distribution,
which includes all the necessary programs and packages to make pdfjam run smoothly.
If you have the necessary bandwidth and disk space for it, I do recommend installing
TeX Live.
The primary documentation for pdfjam is obtained (after installation of pdfjam)
via the command
pdfjam --help
This gives information on the arguments to pdfjam, and the default settings
that apply at your installation. In addition to the arguments that are explicitly
documented there, pdfjam provides access to all of the options of the
pdfpages package: that's a large number of options, and it's a set of options
that might change, so users are referred to the current
pdfpages manual (PDF) to see what's available.
In case you want to look at the pdfjam --help text template online, for example
before you decide whether to install pdfjam, the source is available at
https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam/blob/master/pdfjam-help.txt.
There is also a (very basic) man page, accessed in the usual way
(after installation) by
man pdfjam
There are two main ways:
-
Install the current TeX Live distribution (how you do this will depend on details of your operating system). TeX Live will already contain a recent release of pdfjam. Many thanks to Karl Berry for setting up and maintaining pdfjam as a CTAN package that is part of TeX Live.
-
Install it yourself (e.g., if you don't want TeX Live, or if you want a later release of pdfjam than the one that's currently in TeX Live). Download the latest packaged release of pdfjam from https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam/releases. If for some reason you don't want the latest released version, or even a recently released version, you can still get older versions too: see https://davidfirth.github.io/pdfjam.
The first way, via TeX Live, is recommended as the easiest way for most users.
If you go the second way, then you will have a bit more to do:
- The
pdfjamshell script in the bin sub-directory of the released package should be placed on thePATHof anyone who needs to use it. - The
manfile in the man1 sub-directory should be installed on theMANPATHof all who might need to read it.
On many unix-like systems pdfjam should run without any further configuration,
provided that the pre-requisite TeX installation (such as TeX Live) is present.
If you want to check (e.g., prior to installation) that pdfjam will work on
your system, then
- unzip the
tests.ziparchive (inside the package) cdto your newly madetestssub-directory and follow the instructions that appear there inREADME_tests.md.
If configuration is needed, this can be done through a site-wide or user-specific configuration file. This might be necessary if, for example, your site has a non-standard TeX installation, or a non-standard location for temporary files, or a specific paper size for output PDFs --- or some other reason.
The file
pdfjam.conf
is a sample configuration file which can be edited as needed. After editing,
either install the file for site-wide use (at /etc/pdfjam.conf,
/usr/share/etc/pdfjam.conf, /usr/local/share/pdfjam.conf, or
/usr/local/etc/pdfjam.conf) or as a user-defaults file at ~/.pdfjam.conf.
User settings made at ~/.pdfjam.conf override corresponding settings made
in a site-wide configuration file.
For example, if you prefer to use /usr/bin/xelatex as your default LaTeX engine
(in place of the standard pdflatex), and you want your output page size to be
"US letter" size paper by default, you would simply include the lines
latex=/usr/bin/xelatex
paper=letterpaper
in a plain text file named '.pdfjam.conf' in your home directory.
The path usr/bin/xelatex specifies exactly which LaTeX program will be
used: it could be a path to any one of the pdflatex, lualatex or
xelatex executables. (You can get the full path to an executable
by, for example, the command which xelatex.)
The code word letterpaper is how LaTeX refers to that particular page size.
For other available paper sizes, and all the many
other options that could be set as defaults if you want, please see the output of
pdfjam --help
On some systems it might even be necessary to change the list of places
(i.e., /etc/pdfjam.conf and others as listed above) that is searched for
site-wide configuration files. This can only be done by editing the
pdfjam script itself. To see which directories on your system are
searched for a file named pdfjam.conf, look at the output of
pdfjam --configpath
For a full overview of what pdfjam can do, the importance of the
pdfpages manual (PDF)
cannot be stressed enough!
The following examples merely serve as a brief introduction.
Consider converting each of two documents to a side-by-side "2-up" format.
Since we want the two documents to be processed separately, we'll use the
--batch option:
pdfjam --batch --nup 2x1 --suffix 2up --landscape file1.pdf file2.pdf
This will produce new files file1-2up.pdf and file2-2up.pdf in the current
working directory.
Suppose we want a single new document which puts together selected pages from two different files:
pdfjam file1.pdf '{},2-' file2.pdf '10,3-6' --outfile ../myNewFile.pdf
The new file myNewFile.pdf, in the parent directory of the current one,
contains an empty page, followed by all pages of file1.pdf except the first,
followed by pages 10, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from file2.pdf.
The resulting PDF page size will be whatever is the default paper size for
you at your site. If instead you want to preserve the page size of
(the first included page from) file1.pdf, use the option --fitpaper true.
All pages in an output file from pdfjam will have the same size and
orientation. For joining together PDF files while preserving different page
sizes and orientations, pdfjam is not the tool to use.
To make a portrait-oriented 4-up file from the pages of three input files, with a thin-line frame around the input pages:
pdfjam file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf --no-landscape --frame true --nup 2x2 --suffix 4up --outfile ~/Documents
Here a directory was specified at --outfile: the resultant file in this
case will be ~/Documents/file3-4up.pdf.
(Note that if there's a writeable file with that name already, it will be
overwritten: no check is made, and no warning given.)
Suppose we have a document made up of 'US letter' size pages, and we want to convert it to A4:
pdfjam 'my US letter file.pdf' --a4paper --outfile 'my A4 file.pdf'
A useful application of pdfjam is for producing a handout from a file of
presentation slides. For slides made with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio a
nice 6-up handout on A4 paper can be made by
pdfjam --nup 2x3 --frame true --noautoscale false --delta "0.2cm 0.3cm" --scale 0.95 myslides.pdf --outfile myhandout.pdf
The --delta option here comes from the pdfpages package; the --scale
option is passed to LaTeX's \includegraphics command.
Slides made by LaTeX's beamer package, using the handout class option,
work especially nicely with this! The example wrapper scripts pdfjam-slides3up
and pdfjam-slides6up, in the
pdfjam-extras repository,
are for 3-up and 6-up handouts, respectively.
Suppose we want to trim the pages of our input file prior to n-upping. This can be done by using a pipe:
pdfjam myfile.pdf --trim '1cm 2cm 1cm 2cm' --clip true --outfile /dev/stdout | pdfjam --nup 2x1 --frame true --outfile myoutput.pdf
The --trim option specifies an amount to trim from the left, bottom, right and
top sides respectively; to work as intended here it needs also --clip true.
These (i.e., trim and clip) are in fact options to LaTeX's
\includegraphics command (in the standard graphics package).
Thanks go to Christophe Lange and Christian Lohmaier for suggesting an example on this.
To offset the content of double-sided printed pages so that they are
suitable for binding with a
Heftstreifen, use
the --twoside option:
pdfjam --twoside myfile.pdf --offset '1cm 0cm' --suffix 'offset'
To use PDF input files whose names do not end in '.pdf', you will need to use
the --checkfiles option. This depends on the availability of the file
utility, with support for the options -Lb; this can be checked by trying
file -Lb 'my PDF file'
where 'my PDF file' is the name of a PDF file on your system.
The result should be something like 'PDF document, version 1.4'
(possibly with a different version number).
With 'file -Lb' available, we can use PDF files whose names lack the usual
'.pdf' extension. For example,
pdfjam --nup 2x1 --checkfiles 'my PDF file'
will result in a file named 'my PDF file-2x1.pdf'
in the current working directory.
If you want to print a landscape-oriented PDF document on both sides of the paper, using a duplex printer that does not have 'tumble' capability, make a new version with every second page rotated for printing:
pdfjam --landscape --doublepagestwistodd true my-landscape-document.pdf
1. The script runs but the output doesn't look the way it should. Why?
Most likely either your pdfTeX or your pdfpages installation is an old version.
You could check also that pdftex.def, typically to be found in
.../texmf/tex/latex/graphics/,
is up to date. If the problem persists even with up-to-date versions of pdfTeX,
pdftex.def and pdfpages, then please do report it.
2. What can I do to solve a 'Too many open files' error?
This error has been reported to occur sometimes, when dealing with large numbers of
documents/pages. A suggested solution, if this happens,
is to include additionally (in the call to pdfjam):
-- preamble '\let\mypdfximage\pdfximage \def\pdfximage{\immediate\mypdfximage}'
See for example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1715677/error-too-many-open-files-in-pdflatex for this suggestion and links to more information.
Please report any bugs found in pdfjam, either
- by reporting as an issue at GitHub, https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam/issues
- by email (see https://warwick.ac.uk/dfirth for my email address)
- Sometimes font information (such as ligatures) is lost from the output of
pdfjam. It seems that a fairly simple fix when this happens is to add the option--preamble '\pdfinclusioncopyfonts=1'in your call topdfjam. - In Cygwin, using
pdfjamin a pipeline does not seem to work. The problem seems to be with Cygwin's handling of file descriptors within pipelines. - The
--preambleoption can sometimes clash with other elements of the LaTeX preamble. Some specific things to watch out for:- If the preamble needs to set further options to the geometry package, be sure to use the
\geometry{}command for that. - If options to the color package are to be specified in the preamble,
do not at the same time use the
--pagecoloroption topdfjam.
- If the preamble needs to set further options to the geometry package, be sure to use the
This all grew originally from a script named pdfnup. That was later joined,
in a published package called 'PDFjam', by two further scripts pdfjoin and
pdf90.
At version 2.00, everything was unified through a single script pdfjam, with
many more options. Along with pdfjam various 'wrapper' scripts --- i.e.,
other scripts that use pdfjam in different ways --- were provided, mainly as
examples.
From version 3.02, the extra 'wrapper' scripts are removed from the package,
mainly because they are hard to maintain: different users want different
things, and pdfjam itself provides all the options in any case. So I have
broken out the wrapper scripts into a separate repository, unsupported ---
so that people can still see and use/adapt them if they want.
And maybe even someone else will
want to take on the task of improving and maintaining some of them,
who knows? The wrapper scripts (no longer maintained) can now be found at
https://github.com/rrthomas/pdfjam-extras.
Releases up to version 2.08 are still available at https://davidfirth.github.io/pdfjam.
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