Author: David Firth, http://go.warwick.ac.uk/dfirth
This file is kept up to date at http://go.warwick.ac.uk/pdfjam.
PDFjam is a small collection of shell scripts which provide a simple interface to much of the functionality of the excellent pdfpages 
package (by Andreas Matthias) for pdfLaTeX. These scripts take one or more PDF files (and/or JPG/PNG graphics files) as input, and produce one or more PDF files as output. They are useful for joining files together, selecting pages, reducing several source pages onto one output page, etc., etc.
The main script is named "pdfjam". This is the core of the package.
All of the other scripts provided in the PDFjam package are optional extras. They 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, nor are they extensively tested. They are probably best thought of as simple templates that can be used for constructing more elaborate wrapper scripts as required. At present the wrapper scripts distributed in the PDFjam package are:
A potential drawback of pdfjam and other scripts based upon it is that any hyperlinks in the source PDF are lost. On the positive side, there is no appreciable degradation of image quality in processing PDF files with these programs, unlike some other indirect methods such as pdf2ps | psnup | ps2pdf (in the author's experience).
These tools are designed for Unix-like systems, including Linux and Mac OS X. It seems that they will work also on Windows computers with a suitable installation of Cygwin (with the Cygwin tetex-extras package installed), but this has not been extensively tested.
An alternative set of PDF manipulation tools, which are java-based, is provided by the Multivalent project. They do much the same things as pdfjam, and quite a bit more. Hyperlinks don't seem to be preserved there either, though, when n-upping a document.
For Mac OS X, n-up with a more visual interface is provided by PDF Nup Maker. Like pdfjam, this is a front end to pdflatex/pdfpages.
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.
Some of the options offered by pdfjam also require the LaTeX packages geometry and hyperref.
The primary documentation for pdfjam, and hence for the other scripts that call it, is obtained by
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 to see what's available.
In addition, each of the scripts has a (rather basic) man page. For example,
man pdfjam-pocketmod
gives information about usage and other aspects of the pdfjam-pocketmod script.
PDFjam is a project at freshmeat: please subscribe there to receive update announcements.
Download the shell scripts as pdfjam_latest.tgz.
(If for some reason you don't want the latest version, you can still get older versions. Since version 2.00 the URLs are all of the form http://go.warwick.ac.uk/pdfjam/pdfjam_VN.tgz, with "VN" representing the version number. So "VN" could be 2.00, 2.01, 2.02, 2.03 or 2.04; from PDFjam version 2.05 onwards, the dot will be omitted from the version number in the file name, so "VN" will be 205, 206, etc.)
Various people have kindly packaged PDFjam for distribution in other ways (and perhaps there are some not listed here?):
Cosmin Popescu has written a front-end to the pdfnup script, based on Qt.
To download some stand-alone Mac OS X droplets (based on PDFjam version 1.21), see below.
The shell scripts in the bin sub-directory of the package should be placed on the PATH of anyone who needs to use them.
The man files in the man1 sub-directory should be installed on the MANPATH of all who need to read them.
On many unix-like systems the scripts should run without any further configuration, provided that the pre-requisite TeX installation is present. If you want to check (e.g., prior to installation) that pdfjam will work on your system, please unzip the tests sub-directory of the package and follow the instructions that appear in tests/README-tests.txt.
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 paper size that is different from the A4 international standard.
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 want your own output to be on "US letter" size paper by default, simply put the line
paper=letterpaper
in a plain text file named file .pdfnup.conf in your home directory. (The code word letterpaper is how LaTeX refers to that particular page size; for other available paper sizes, 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, use
pdfjam --configpath
For a full overview of what pdfjam can do, the importance of the pdfpages manual 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 --outfile . file1.pdf file2.pdf
This will produce new files file1-2up.pdf and file2-2up.pdf in the current working directory. The above call could be shortened a bit, by using pdfnup, to
pdfnup --batch --suffix 2up file1.pdf file2.pdf
In a 'vanilla' installation of pdfjam, the default for --outfile is 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: this is the default action of the pdfjoin convenience script.
(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; and since pdfjoin simply calls pdfjam, the same comment applies also to pdfjoin. I'm told that if you have Ghostscript installed, something along these lines might more nicely join files with different page sizes and orientations:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
But I haven't tried it.)
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.
The two wrapper scripts pdfjam-slides6up and pdfjam-slides3up are provided in order to make this particular application of pdfjam easy: for example,
pdfjam-slides3up --pagenumbering true --batch slides1.pdf slides2.pdf
makes a pair of 3-up handouts slides1-3up.pdf and slides2-3up.pdf, with space for side-notes and with the handout pages numbered.
(Slides made by LaTeX's beamer package, using the handout class option, work especially nicely with this!)
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 | \ pdfnup --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 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,
pdfnup --checkfiles 'my PDF file'
should result in a file named "my PDF file-nup.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
Please feel free to suggest other examples that might help people! (For the email address, see reporting bugs)
Under Mac OS X, DropScript has been used to make some simple drag-and-drop applications. Some sample droplets are provided in pdfdroplets_1.21.dmg: these may be all you'll need! The sample droplets look like this:
These droplets assume that your pdflatex is at /usr/texbin/pdflatex. If pdflatex lives somewhere else on your system, the droplets won't work until you include in your home directory a file named .pdfnup.conf (or there is a system-wide file pdfnup.conf at one of the four locations listed above), containing the line
pdflatex=/path/to/pdflatex
where /path/to/pdflatex is the answer you get when you type which pdflatex in the Terminal. (If you get no answer, chances are that you do not have pdflatex installed on your Mac; if you need to install it, you could just download and install MacTeX or one of its slimmed-down variants.)
1. Why "PDFjam"?
Because it's for PDF files, and jam is what I like best on my toast (well, second best after marmalade, anyway).
2. The thing 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. (Check also that pdftex.def, to be found in 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.
Please report any bugs found in these scripts, to d.firth (at warwick.ac.uk).
Solving these problems is on the to-do list: if you have solved one of them already please let me know!
2.08: fixed a bug in one of the tests [2010-11-14]
2.07: two other common graphics formats (JPG and PNG) are now explicitly allowed as input files (i.e., not only PDF files are allowed as inputs). [2010-11-13]
2.06: changed the pdfbook script to include --booklet true as the default behaviour (thanks to Julien Bossert for this good suggestion). [2010-05-11]
2.05: changes to the pdfbook script [the --right-edge-binding option is now redundant, and there's a new --short-edge option for binding along the short edge of pages instead of the long edge (thanks to Marco Pessotto for this)]. The --preamble option to pdfjam is enhanced, to allow multiple instances which get concatenated. Also various minor corrections to man pages. [2010-04-25]
2.04: various minor improvements suggested by Debian maintainers (thanks to Eduard Bloch for these). The main things are: addition of the --version option; liberalisation of pdfjam to allow files in JPEG format to be specified as input, as well as PDF (I don't know why or if this might work! but some people have said it does); tidying of the man files; and more use of exec, to avoid forking. [2010-04-22]
2.03: fixed a bug which caused problems when your /bin/sh is the zsh shell; fixed a bug which prevented the correct representation of many UTF-8 characters in pdfinfo data. [2010-04-20]
2.02: more progress on portability; introduced the beginnings of a suite of tests; improvements in the --keepinfo functionality, and in the treatment of file permissions (thanks to Marco Pessotto for these). [2010-04-14]
2.01: fixed a silly bug (thoughtless use of "test -a" in a couple of places) which seriously affected portability. [2010-04-13]
2.00: a major re-design. This is not completely backward-compatible with previous versions of the pdfnup, pdfjoin and pdf90 scripts. The differences in interface are few, though, and the main ones are listed below.
The main changes are:
In addition, various reported bugs have been fixed — many thanks to all those kind people who reported them (too numerous to list here!) [2010-03-14]
1.21: bug fixes, including security issues (many thanks to Eduard Bloch, Robert Buchholz and Martin Vaeth for helpful reports on vulnerabilities and for kindly contributing patches); the scripts now call for /bin/bash as interpreter; availability of mktemp is now also assumed; the Mac OS X droplets now look for pdflatex at (by default) /usr/texbin/pdflatex [2009-01-19]
1.20: added minimal man pages; added extra possible locations for the site-wide configuration file [2005-01-25]
1.11: added the --scale option to pdfnup, which allows page margins either to be enlarged (e.g,. --scale 0.9) or reduced (e.g,. --scale 1.1) by scaling the page contents. By popular request! [2004-10-13]
1.10: output files now appear by default in same directory as input, rather than in the current working directory; fixed a bug that caused the scripts not to work on some versions of Solaris (thanks to Daniel Gebhart); major improvements to the Mac OS X sample droplets. [2004-06-24]
1.03: minor changes towards POSIX compliance. [2004-05-09]
1.02: added a COPYING file to the package. [2004-05-08]
1.00: package re-named PDFjam. [2004-05-07]
0.99a: a minor change to the output of pdfnup --help and pdfjoin --help [2004-05-06]
0.99: various improvements to pdfnup, including the handling of multiple PDF input files. Added pdfjoin and pdf90. [2004-05-05]
0.97: corrections to the output of pdfnup --help [2004-04-23]
0.96: minor changes to comments in the pdfnup script [2004-02-12]
0.95: added the possibility of site-specific and user-specific configuration files (thanks to Jason Lewis for suggesting this) [2004-01-28]
0.9: added --openright (thanks to Jason Lewis for suggesting this) [2004-01-28]
0.8: added pdfnup --help facility (thanks to Wilfrid Kendall for this suggestion) [2003-09-12]
0.7: paths involving spaces now permitted; page trimming added (thanks to Alex Montgomery for suggesting that); default output filename now has a dash inserted before the "nup" label (as in wasteful-2x2.pdf ); sample Mac OS X droplets provided [2003-01-26]
0.6: use of paths involving spaces now reports an error [2002-08-22]
0.5: fixed a bug which caused incompatibility with some types of unix [2002-06-24]
0.4: better error trapping, improved portability [2002-04-30]
0.3: first public release of pdfnup [2002-04-04]